The Great Ideas Today 1968
"The Great Ideas Today" series are annual supplements to the Great Books of the Western World set published by
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\1
Angel
Family
Animal
Fate
Aristocracy
Form
Art
Astronomy
God Good and
Beauty
Government
Being
Habit
Cause
Happiness
Chance
History
Change
Honor
Citizen
Hypothesis
Constitution
Idea
Courage
Immortality
Custom and Convention
Induction
Definition
Infinity
Democracy
Judgment
Desire
Justice
Dialectic
Knowledge
Duty
Labor
Education
Language
Element
Law
Emotion
Liberty
Eternity
Life and
Evolution
Logic
Experience
Love
Evil
Death
:>-•l^
T'W
M
[ffiS!wi2Rl
The Great Man
^I^^^^^^^B^
Mathematics Matter
Ideas
Reasoning
^^^^^^K
Relation
^^^^Hf
Religion
Mechanics
Revolution
Medicine
Rhetoric
Memory and
Imagination
1^^| ^|
Same and Other
Metaphysics
Science
Mind
Sense
Monarchy
Sign and Symbol
Nature
Sin
Necessity and Contingency
Slavery
OHgarchy
Soul
One and Many
Space
Opinion
State
Opposition
Temperance
Philosophy
Theology
Physics
Time
Pleasure and Pain
Truth
Poetry
Tyranny
Principle
Universal and Particular
Progress
Virtue and Vice
Prophecy
War and
Prudence
Wealth
Punishment
Will
Quality
Wisdom
Quantity
World
Peace
an Oyster House"; painting by Richard Caton Woodville, 1848 "Politics in
oil
THE GREAT IDEAS TODAY 1968
WILLIAM BENTON
Publisher
ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, Chicago
'
London
•
Toronto
•
Geneva
•
Sydney
•
Tokyo
INC. •
Manila
©
1968 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Copyright under International Copyright Union All rights reserved
under Pan American and Universal Copyright Conventions by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in the U.S.A.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 61-65561
The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis, copyright 1944 by The Macmillan Company, is reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company and of Geoffrey Bles Ltd. All rights reserved.
"The Sheep Child" are reprinted from POEMS 1957-1967 by permisWesleyan University Press. "Falling" was first published in THE NEW
"Falling" and sion
of
YORKER. "Outward"
& World,
is
SELECTED POEMS by permission of Harcourt Brace published in THE NEW YORKER. "On the Eve" is reprinted
reprinted from
Inc. First
from THE SIXTIES No. 9, 1967, by permission of The Sixties Press. "A Night in Odessa" and "A Son of the Romanovs" are reprinted from the November and December, 1967 issues of Harper s Magazine by permission of the author. Mr. Spender's poems are reprinted by permission of the author. They were published
which
in
first
first
THE TRANSATLANTIC REVIEW, except for "Auden Aetat. XX, LX," appeared in SHENANDOAH and THE SUNDAY TIMES (London).
FREDERICK
DISTRIBUTED TO THE TRADE BY: A. PRAEGER, INC., NEW YORK, WASHINGTON
THE GREAT IDEAS TODAY 1968 ROBERT
M.
HUTCHINS
MORTIMER
J.
ADLER
Editors in Chief
OTTO BIRD Executive Editor
Contributors
Eugene
J.
Theodore
McCarthy
Louis Simpson
C. Sorensen
James Dickey
Leonard Cottrell
Stephen Spender
John Plamenatz
Richard H. Rovere
Arthur Schlesinger
William R. Dell Managing Editor
Geoffrey
Ward
John
William Gorman
Jeffrey
Weiss
Assistant Editor
Contributing Editor
Will Gallagher
Picture Editor
Howard
J.
Thomas Beatty
L.
Baumann
Art Supervisor
Ron
Thompson
Picture Editor
Platt
Jr.
Art Director
Leslie
R.
Villani
Designer
Production Manager
Harry Sharp
W. H. Burget Production Coordinator
Barbara Cleary
Production Coordinator
Chief Copy Editor
Copy Elizabeth Chastain
Anthony
Editors
R. Burrell
Corv Sodetani
CONTENTS PART ONE
A Symposium
Ideas and Politics: Introduction
2
Evgene]. McCarthy: Reassessment
4
Theodore
C. Sorensen: Politics
and Dissent
Richard H. Rovere:
Political Ideas in the
Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr.
PART
TWO
The
Year's
Developments
A Symposium
Intellectuals in
:
in the Arts
New
James Dickey: The
Self as
Stephen Spender: The Little
John
United States
American
.
Politics
.
36
.
48
and Sciences
on Contemporary Poetry
Louis Simpson: The
A
20
78
American Poetry
80
Agent
Vital Self
90
and Secondary Means
.
.
Anthology of Contemporary Poetry
R. Platt:
The
New
98 108
Biology and the Shaping
120
of the Future
Leonard Cottrell: Archaeology John Plamenatz: Some American Images
170 of
Democracy
.
.
250
PART THREE
The Contemporary The Idea
Status of a Great Idea
of Equality
302
by the Editors
PART FOUR
Additions to the Great Books Library
William Wordsworth:
Walter Bagehot: C.
S.
Selected Prose and Poetry
Physics and Politics
Lewis: The Abolition of
Man
....
352
406 496
A
NOTE ON REFERENCE STYLE the following pages, passages in Great Books of the Western are referred to by the initials 'GBWWJ followed by
InWorld
volume, page number, and page section. Thus, p.
210b' refers to page 210 in
which
Volume 39
is
in
Adam
Vol. 39,
The Wealth of Nations, the Western World. The small
Smith's
Great Books of
page
*GBWW,
In books printed in single upper and lower halves of the page. In books printed in double column, 'a' and *b' refer to the upper and lower halves of the left column, and 'd' to the upper and lower halves of the right column. For example, 'Vol. 53, p. 210b' refers to the lower half of page 210, since Volume 53, James's Principles letter
'b'
column,
indicates the
V and
'b'
section.
refer to the
V
of Psychology, p.
is
printed in single column.
210b' refers to the lower
7, Plato's
Dialogues,
is
left
On
the other hand, 'Vol.
quarter of the page, since
7,
Volume
printed in double column.
Gateway to the Great Books is referred to by the initials 'GGB' followed by volume and page number. Thus, 'GGB, Vol. 10, pp. 39-57' refers to pages 39 through 57 of Volume 10 of Gateway to the Great Books, which is James's essay, "The Will to Believe."
PART ONE
Ideas and Politics
A
Symposium
Ideas and Politics
INTRODUCTION Government by
and democratic society. government depends upon discussion, at least among its leaders, as a means of determining policy. But a democratic government differs from others to the extent to which it must resort to discussion. A large and important part of the business of governing is carried on in deliberative assemblies that are open to the public. In addition, the government must periodically render an account to the people whom it serves. It must then engage in discussion with the nation at large. There are many subjects of political discussion, but all tend to fall into
Any form
discussion
is
essential to a free
of
one of three general groups according as the object of concern is primarily a person, a policy, or a principle. The first of these subjects needs no explanation. Discussion in any election year turns upon the persons seeking to win election to political office. Candidates, however, expound policies; that is, they draw up plans and outline undertakings to meet special needs
and solve particular problems. But, beyond
these, political discussion also
not infrequently involves questions of principle and general ideas regarding the ends and basic
means
of government. Politics then
becomes most
completely concerned with ideas as such.
Although
it
sounds paradoxical, especially in an election year, it is noneand not persons or policies, constitute the most
theless true that ideas,
important subject of political discussion. Compared with ideas, persons
and
policies are transient
and
short-lived, since discussion of
ited to the life of the candidate or the
them
urgency of the problem
for
is
lim-
which
the policy is designed. But the discussion of the ideas involved in the problems of government grows and proliferates with their application to new and changing conditions. They are great ideas to the extent that they are of perennial concern.
Even a
The
ideas that Thucydides discussed are with
much that he had to say about them still remains relevant. relatively new idea upon the political scene, such as the ideal of
us today, and
Introduction
political
hind
and
social equality for
all,
has a long history of discussion be-
it.
word that our symposium is conwere invited to reflect freely upon the role of ideas in politics. However, since this is the year of a presidential election, we have intentionally focused attention upon politics in the United States. All four contributors have long experience in dealing with the subject of the symposium. Two of them have been associated with the academic profession. Senator Eugene McCarthy was a professor of sociology before he entered politics, and his books have expounded and analyzed poHtical ideas as well as advocated particular policies. Mr. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., It is
cerned.
is
with ideas in
The
this sense of the
participants
the Albert Schweitzer professor of the humanities at City College,
York, and
known
New
books on American politics. Yet he, like Mr. Theodore Sorensen, has also been an "idea-man" in the field of practical politics— both having served as special assistants to the late President Kennedy. The fourth participant, Mr. Richard H. Rovere, long an observer is
well
of the political scene,
is
for his
known
for his penetrating
and learned commen-
upon it, especially as seen from Washington. These essays were all written before President Johnson's announcement that he would not be a candidate for reelection, and, of course, before subsequent political events. Two other contributions to this year's volume also bear upon the subject of the symposium, although they do not appear in it. The first of these is the analysis by Professor John Plamenatz of some recent American studies of democracy, in the course of which he has occasion to comment on the place and function of ideas in the democratic process. The other, and in fact the longest essay on the subject in this book, is the fifth chapter of Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics, reprinted in Part Four. Entitled "The Age of Discussion," it is an examination of the role of ideas in the advancement of human progress. tary
SENATOR EUGENE
J.
McCARTHY
Eugene J. McCarthy was born in Watkins, Minnesota, in 1916. He was graduated from St. Johns University in Collegeville, Minnesota, in 1935, and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota in 1938. Senator McCarthy was a teacher and professor for ten years. During the Second World
War
he served as a civilian technical assistant in military intelligence for the War Department. He was acting head of the sociology department at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul at the time of his election to Congress in 1948. A member of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, he represented Minnesota's Fourth Congressional District in the House of Representatives for ten years. Senator McCarthy is a member of the Council on Religious
Freedom and Public Affairs of the National Conference of tians and Jews; the Board of the Federal Union, Inc.; and
man
Chrischair-
Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission. Elected to the United States Senate in 1958, he is currently serving his second term. He is a member of the Senate Committees on Finance and Foreign Relations, Senate Select Committee on Standards and Conduct, Democratic Steering Committee, and chairman of the African Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is the author of four books: Frontiers in American Democracy (1960), The Crescent Dictionary of American Politics (1962), A Liberal Answer to the Conservative Challenge (1964), and The Limits of Power (1967). of the Franklin
Reassessment
popular in the United States to declare that politics
is
It naire
and non-ideological.
tries is closely lines,
related to ideas
It is
assumed that
and that
is
non-doctri-
politics in other
coun-
parties divide along ideological
refusing to enter coalitions or combinations with people or parties
of diflFerent views and, consequently, encouraging the
growth of many
parties as in France.
In England, too,
it
is
generally assumed that party lines are rather
drawn. By American standards this is true, although the Conservative Party in England has gone much farther along the way of socialization than has the Republican Party, which is considered by some its counterpart in the United States, and it has, in fact, gone much farther than the Democratic Party. The British Labour Party comes very close to being an ideological party since it bases many of its programs on the ideas of the Fabian Socialists. But in England there is overlapping of views between members of the two major parties, especially on quesclearly
tions of foreign policy.
American
and government, does have a basis in ideas. It is not between liberals and conservatives that some politicians and commentators and editors and authors attempt to make today. After visiting the United States ^n 1920, the English critic G. K. Chesterton wrote: "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic theological lucidity in politics,
the simple distinction
the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical
which is The American
and also great literature." all men are by JeflFerson, is this: ". created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
politics
happiness."
And
also theoretical politics
creed, as stated
.
.
then, immediately following, he states: "That, to secure
UNEMPLOYED COAL MINER Americans can
say, "I
have a
IN
right to a decent
WEST VIRGINIA income and a
and unemployed." 6
right not to he poor
.
Eugene
J.
McCarthy
these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving ." powers from the consent of the governed .
their just
.
We
should add to this, I believe, the classic statement of the purposes to government as proclaimed in the Preamble to the Constitution: ". of tranquillity, insure domestic justice, establish perfect union, more form a provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure ." And add also the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity .
.
the forthright affirmation of the dignity of
Amendment and
man
.
.
as reflected in the First
other sections of the Bill of Rights.
These documents express the basic ideas and principles upon which American government and American politics are founded. Our failure to associate politics and politicians with philosophical and intellectual positions arises in large part from the absence of any genuine conflict about the acceptance of these basic ideas.
Of
none of the basic ideas set forth in the Declaration of Independence was entirely new to the founders of the United States. The concepts of natural law and the dignity of man run through the history of Western civilization. The distinctive aspect was that the men who established American government were not only stating ethical and political principles. They were practical politicians, taking high risks in political action and devising procedures, separation of powers, checks and balances, and creating a workable structure of government. As politicians they did not demand the ideal; they made political compromises, as with the status of large and small states; they also made moral compromises, at least indirectly, by failing to abolish slavery on the basis that this was an issue so disputed that insistence on it would result in the worse evil of anarchy. They did limit the slave trade to twenty years and provided methods of amending the Constitution. Perhaps nothing so reflects the anguish of compromise as the three-fifths clause by which that proportion of slaves would be counted for purposes course,
of representation.
General acceptance of the ideals set forth in the Declaration took nearly a century— and a civil war— and the idea of equality did not achieve even formal acceptance until very recent times. Any serious effort to justify discrimination
principle are
more
now
is
and segregation of the races on the basis of The arguments used in politics today
a thing of the past.
likely to
appeal to the
realities of historic cultural patterns, to
move slowly, and to the dangers of violence in moving too we grant that the ideal at least has been accepted, political
the need to swiftly. If
action
is
still
incomplete in achieving in practice the reality of equal
opportunity for
all in
housing, education, employment opportunities,
though somewhat further progress has been made accommodations
The
struggle across the centuries over slavery
al-
in the use of public
and segregation
is
a
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN IN A RURAL SCHOOLHOUSE NEAR SELMA, ALABAMA Education
.
.
.
^^9 become a
citizens right in
somber and the
America
time gap which can exist between the ideal between the proclamation of the ideal and the ability
illustration of the
practical,
of politicians
and
parties to achieve
it.
OUR NEW CONDITIONS Ideas
are again
becoming important. There is a growing need to reand basic rights guaranteed by
think old positions, to redefine the old the Constitution.
For example, freedom of speech today involves much more than what was understood when it was first guaranteed in the Constitution of the
:v'-
^y.
I
United
States.
Today we have
to define
it
and seek
to secure
it
in a
world
communications are controlled by very few people. This basic right today must be understood and interpreted, not as freedom to say what one wants to say, but as the right of men to hear the truth. We must develop processes and procedures and rules so that, at least, the greatest measure of truth that is available may be given in,
which most means
to
people for their judgment and their consideration.
of
assembly guaranteed by the Constitution was a rather simple right as exercised in 1789. Today, however, we have to define it and attempt to exercise it in a complicated society through organizations, in demonstrations, in protest movements, in political parties.
The freedom
of
rr^i
r
'
t
U --..,^.
'i-j. --
-]
^-.F
r
Ti:.\A.\l
1
AHMKH The
IN
1111.
DOOliWAY OF HIS SHACK, MISSISSIPPI
right to a house in a
community
10
R-
96
the
woman's Ah!
of pain.
James Dickey
Who
dreamed this; the dark folding murderer's hands round the lamps? The rain blowing growth to rot? Lives passed beneath a ritual
men's ghosts and bodies; the few healers weak charms, moving here and there among the lamps?
That With
tears
their
Now
one cannot say with certainty whether Spencer ever did anything like this or not, though such is the persuasiveness of the poem that one is more likely than not to believe he did. But what is certain is that he reinvented himself in order to write the poem. He put himself in a car in the dark outside a country house, and he gave this figure of himself a way of thinking, a set of images and rhythms, and above all a way of speaking that he believed were right to body forth the scene in his particular way of being a poet. We are in the poem because he is, at a definite
place and time, and
we
experience the invisible doctor and
through his reactions. What he thinks and feels are what and imaginative mind has found to say about the incident between the time it happened or was invented and the time the poem was sick
woman
a reflective
completed.
The
I-figure does not live in the real
world of fact but in a kind of
magical abstraction, an emotion- and thought-charged personal version it. Rather than in a place where objects and people have the taciturn and indisputable tangibility, the stolid solidity, of fact, the poetic agent inhabits a realm more rich and strange and a good deal "thicker" than
of
reality, for
it
gathers to itself
all
the analogies
obvious or farfetched— that the poetic
mind
as
it
and associations— either ranges through the time
and space of its existence can bring to the subject. Constrained only by the laws imposed on him by the situation of any and all types, from the most matter-of-fact sort of reporting to the wildest phantasmagoria, he can be whatever his poem needs him to be. It is by virtue of his having his existence in just
such a speciahzed kind of linguistic
I-figure— and in another
way
the poet— becomes
what he
fiction that the
is:
a
man
subject
permutations and combinations of words, to the vicissitudes of denotation and connotation. Both are creatures trapped by grammar, and
to the
mercy of its expressive possibilities and those of all the particuand means of the poem. The poet is also a man who has a new or insufiiciently known part of himself released by these means. He is set free, for he is more inclusive than before; he is greater than he was. also at the lars
97
STEPHEN SPENDER
Stephen Spender, who contributed the essay on literature in The Great Ideas Today 1965, is a icell-known writer and poet. Spender first
published his poetry and criticism in the early lOSCfs, and as
a translator, editor, lecturer, poet, and
critic, he has continued to enhance our enjoyment of literature. He was born in London in 1909 and received his education at University College, Oxford. Graduating in 1930, he initially achieved recognition as a member of the group of young Oxford poets noted for including social
and
political
commentary
in their verse. Prior to
World War
II
he coedited the influential literary journal Horizon. After the war he served as counselor in the section of Letters in UNESCO and, in 1953, was one of the founders of Encounter magazine. He has lectured at many universities, and was appointed Visiting Professor of English at Northwestern University in 1963. Among his many books are: Collected Poems, 1928-1953 (1955); an autobiography. World Within World (1951); and collections of critical essays: The Creative Element (1953), The Making of a Poem
and The Struggle of the Modern (1963). His most recent books are Selected Poems (1964) and The Magic Flute (1966). He gave the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Washington in 1968. To honor his contributions to English letters, Spender was made a Com(1955),
mander
of the British
Empire
in
1962.
98
The
Vital Self and
Secondary Means
ways which poets think about The are inevitably complex and confusing.
their
in
vocation,
and yet
it is
of this world. Poetry
own and
We know
others' poetry
that poetry
is
a
not a spiritual calling like religion, with values not is
not a profession; yet being a poet and living
on the by-products of poetry— such as lecturing and teaching— has become one, just as the owner of a coal mine might live on the by-products of coal and make no profit from the coal itself. To all intents and purposes, poetry cannot be taught, and yet a person with poetic talent has to learn to write poetry.
and not made, and a nuisance used to argue that what X writes must be poetry because he is a "poet." All the same, I feel certain that what makes a poem poetry is some primary quality of sensibility— more than sensibility, of being— which only the true poet is gifted to make the language of the poem realize. The fact that this primary quality is sine qua non makes nonsense of all poetic movements, schools, promotion programs, and awards, and even of most critics' judgments of contemporary poetry. For this reason, we feel an immediate sympathy when Robert Graves says that a poem has to be addressed to the Muse. Graves may talk nonsense when he lays down the law in favor of Muse-poetry and against Apollonian poetry; yet we know that what he has said is important in that it means poetry must be to or for or about something else than a It is
to say
a cliche to say that poets are born it
when
it
is
99
Contemporary Poetry
movement, a gang, an award, or just the poem itself. In the same way, when A. E. Housman declares, echoing Wordsworth and the Romantics, that Dryden and Pope wrote not poetry but versified prose, we answer the charge not by defending a rationalist poetry of meaning, but by pointing out that the path of tough-minded intellectual argumentation did lead Dryden and Pope to write lines which we recognize as poetry with the same tingling response as we recognize Shakespeare, or Blake, or Wordsworth himself for that matter. fashion, a
seems almost a sign of a major contemporary poet that he is exown poetry, or— putting it more subtlyuncertain as to whether he has ever written poetry. A poet's critical statements about writing tend to be those of a technician, a craftsman, and a critic of other men's works; thus they produce often an impression of confidence, of dogmatism even. A poet writing about his craft is naturally concerned with what I call secondary matters. The primary matter of whether it is poetry at all is the one he can least deal with, because in the last analysis what makes poetry poetry is indefinable. It
tremely uncertain about his
In their public statements modern poets lead us up to the point beyond which there is the indefinable, "language rich and strange," the sensation that makes the hair at the back of the neck bristle. This is what Pope and Dryden sometimes have in common with Shakespeare and Blake. When a poet writes of poetry as an intellectual game, we cannot be sure that he means quite what he says. I suspect that this is how he talks to a poetry-reading public. But when he is discussing poetry with a fellow poet, he is likely to single out a line and say "that is poetry." Eliot used to say that sometimes when writing he felt an excitement which gave him confidence. Then, at a certain interval after finishing a poem, he might read it with an excitement which corresponded to that he had when writing it. But later, he would feel quite remote from the lines he had written with passionate certainty. Rilke endured ten years in which he was unable to write poetry. Yet without building up a poet's silence as a variety of his expression, one may feel that this interval was devoted to poetry through being devoted to waiting. It shows Rilke knew that the routine part of poetry is secondary to the most important thing which is a kind of attention, a waiting for the poetry as for a visitation.
And
if
Williams wrote a few lines every day,
one hears that William Carlos
this
does not contradict Rilke's
ten years' silence, for one immediately supposes that Williams' attention
was keeping himself
in a state of athletic technical
when it came. The experience of poets seems
preparedness for the
poetry,
technique, routine,
does not, in
itself,
have been given
skill
to
result in poetry. to the
show then
that although discipline,
are of course necessary, just obeying the rules
Very
little critical
interesting question of
100
attention seems to
what made poets
like
Stephen Spender
Wordsworth and Tennyson dry up. The usual answers all really amount to saying that the poets grew old and weary and disillusioned and therefore prosaic and dull in their poetry. It seems to me possible that one contributing factor for the dullness of the later Wordsworth and Tennyson
is
that they got too skilled at writing their kind of verse, so that there
was no struggle with form and words. There was too fascination of what's difficult."
The
Httle
goals of their technique
of "the
were too
easily achieved.
do not altogether beUeve that form and technique are absolutely I think that in some of the most interesting poetry there is, moving within the form, the struggle of the expression to find that form. I
inseparable.
One
reason for thinking
sensibility is
which
this is that great
poetry
unique. Form, the formal,
is
is
a
is
the expression of
mold
for
which there
precedent, just as technique, as such, observes rule. Therefore the
unique state of sensibility must always struggle with form, be a bit outside the technique. In the great passages of The Prelude, or for that matter in The Lotus Eaters, there is the feeling of an exhilaration in the one, of lassitude in the other,
which breaks through or weighs down the
form. Poetry can be great while
still leaving the reader with a feeling form and content are not a perfect fit. What I am saying has some bearing on the argument that poetry is an intellectual game with language like a crossword puzzle. Eliot and Auden have both at times supported this argument, but I am not convinced they quite meant what they said. That poetry is an intelligent pastime, not serious, is a good thing to say to people whose unseriousness consists in
that
taking things too seriously— solemnly: questioners at poetry readings
ask poets to support and inspire social causes legislators of
mankind,"
to the great
human
However, the idea
mean two
who
who
become "unacknowledged
think that a poet should provide the answer
problems. of poetry as a
game
of
form and words could only which
things. First, that the feeling, idea, subject, or content,
makes the poet write the poem,
is
important only in that
it
gives
him
the opportunity of playing such a verbal game, according to rules provided, or
which
is
which he may invent. This would be to abolish the distinction widely (and rightly, I think) held to exist between "occasional"
poetry and poetry.
The
may indeed be
slighter than the comand that Eliot was trying at the deepest level of his activity to "say something" in Four Quartets, and that, for him, poetry was the best way of saying it. For a poet who has something not just the poem itself to communicate, poetry is simply the best possible way of saying it. There is also, of course, the game of saying it as well as possible and according to set rules. The answer to the "only an intellectual game" theory is that saying things, whether in prose or poetry, can be both serious as well as amusing. Poetry, if you
mon
reader thinks, but
distinction still I
believe
it
101
exists,
Contemporary Poetry like, is serious (as
same
something said) and amusing
time. Probably the writer of the
Book
(as verbal play) at the
of Revelations enjoyed work-
ing out his apocalyptic imagery. But this does not serious about
what he had
Second, the "poetry
is
mean
that he
was not
to say.
only a game" theory can be taken to
mean
that a
poet cannot be single-mindedly thinking of a feeling or an idea which he expresses in the poem, because he has also to think of a
rhyme
or the
stanza form. Balzac uses this as an argument against poetry in his intro-
duction to Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme. But
you think that poetry ground unless it were argued— as I do not think it can be— that saying anything— whether in poetry or prose— becomes a divided and compromised aim if part of your attention is directed to the way of saying it— as it surely must be if it is to be said truly and well. The "poetry is only a game" theory plays into the hands of the people it is directed against, those who think that poetry to be "sincere" and "serious" must be rhymeless free verse, or even must— as Karl Shapiro at one time was arguing— be prose poems. It lends itself to false dichotomies such as those alternatives set forth by Louis Simpson in an interesting article, "Dead Horses and Live Issues" {The Nation, April 24, 1967), between "New Critics" poets and their self-expressionistic opposites. The first (now superseded) kind of poet stands for: is
the best
the
way
poem
if
of saying certain things, this idea falls to the
treated as an object complete in
itself;
impersonality, a
distance between the poet and the poem, use of a persona, irony, et cetera
His opposite, not, rather
now
in the
ascendancy, can be defined by what he does
than what he does, want to write:
don't want to write Low Tide verse— about finding a dead fish low tide; or the poem about the statues in the Villa Medici; or the well-rhymed poem about picking up the kid's busted tricycle and thinking of the death of Patroclus. In fact, they don't want to write any kind of rhymed poem They don't want to write the so-called 'well-made' poem that lends itself to the little knives and formaldehyde of a graduate school.
They at
.
Simpson
.
.
also tells us:
The change can be measured by comparing the reputation of W. H. Auden today with what it was twenty years ago. Auden was nothing if not rational. Reading an Auden poem today is a chilling experience. Talk about snows of yesteryear!
But Simpson notes wisely: schools of poetry are a contradiction in terms and cannot poets,
who
really are,
want poems above everything 102
else
last.
For
and
will
Stephen Spender
condemn bad, even
recognize good work and
demnation are not
in
accordance with their
if
the praise and con-
own
aesthetic, pohtical
or other interests.
The
He me
is
"New
and of the now them are not Simpson's own, it seems. merely reporting them. Both sets of attitudes seem significant to attitudes of the
fashionable poets
who
Critic" poets, or ex-poets,
are "anti"
in a rather negative
way,
in that they
make me
think of contemporary
poetry as a kind of squalid playground in which gangs of ambitious nonentities claiming to belong to "schools" are squabbling about the
game— whether poems
rules of the
member on
his side
psychedelically
should rhyme or not, whether some
should cultivate an
"turned
on"
which measures by
detachment or one of seems an incredibly petty modishness the reputation of
air of ironic
sincerity.
It
community, Auden. And
in case the reader of this essay suspects
bitterness, I
should make
this
a distinction
its
between the
me
of
some personal
feelings of disappoint-
ment one may have which are the almost inevitable accompaniment of practicing an art before critics and public, and the feeling that the conditions in which that art exists are narrowing, petty, and soiling. What is really discouraging about the Hfe of writers, which literature, after all, is rooted in, is that it was and remains for most of those participating "Grub Street." A literary rabble, whether composed of New Critical lecturers in English departments of a is
shameful, because
it
New
University or of psychedelic beatniks,
introduces into art politics and the competitiveness
marketplace— or, of the examination room. poets start worrying about publicity and rewards, there is the danger of dragging poetry down to the level of other things that are produced by routines and can be priced and ranked. of the
When
Some reader may protest that competitiveness and fashion are less dangerous to poetry than a false piety which accepts everything called poetry and makes few distinctions.
what is good what is bad to pass as good. I would accept this. So be it. Poetry has to be controversial; poets have to make a living, usually in other ways than by writing poetry; there has to be some kind of patronage, whether by universities offering jobs, or foundations making awards; the very fact that poetry is a mysterious vocation makes poets unsure of themselves and therefore vain, anxious to promote themselves and their friends, do down their rivals. We do have to live in Grub Street. The important thing, however, is that the distinction between what is primary as a state of being, of sensibility, to be communicated in poetry and what is secondary as means, technique, conditions of work, promoIt is
better to attack
unfairly than to allow
tion,
publishing, awards, jobs, should not be
lost. It is difficult to
discuss
primary— what makes a poet a poet and a poem a poem— because it is indefinable and can only be indicated: as when we say that a poem has a certain tone, or that it produces on us a physical sensation.
what
is
103
Contemporary Poetry I
hesitate to say
what
will find unacceptable:
I
fear both the academics
that
I
believe poetry, in
and the psychedeHcs
common
with
all
the
be a language for another pre-verbal language of feeling, experiences recollected, and sensibility— a language of the "soul" so immediate and intimate to the essential nature of the artist that music, rhythm, and imagery are like membranes, skin of an eardrum, which while drummed upon with sound are a medium of communication for a meaning which is beyond the sound. Paul Gauguin, discussing the origin of a painting, writes: arts,
to
Where does the execution moment when intense
the
of a picture start,
where does
it
end? At
feelings are fused in the depths of one's
work then, suddenly created, brutally if you wish, in appearance. Cold and rational calculations have nothing to do with this eruption, for who knows when, in the depths of his being, the work was begun, perhaps uncon-
being, that the
but great and superhuman
sciously?
And
the famous passage from Proust's
Time Regained with which
Randall Jarrell so effectively concludes his essay, "The Obscurity of the Poet," extends the conception of art as language for another language
beyond
art, to
outside
life:
something within the conditions of
life itself
which seems
we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor make the talented artist All that
consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece
work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must for ever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in of
order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those
unknown laws
which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there— those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only— and still!— to fools.
The primary then
is
the feeling, the impulse, the sense even of a task,
a vocation, "invisible only to fools." This attributes,
which we
call great or
is
the source of the qualities, the
minor, good or
less
good
(just as
we
104
II
Stephen Spender might define a shade of a color), when they are realized through the poet and all the means he employs— means that begin with his intelligence and physical vitality and end with technique, paper and ink, or a listening audience. I do not want to lose sight of the fact that the secondary qualities are extremely important. We are quite right to keep them in the forefront of critical discussion. For they are what can be most usefully analyzed, yet they are secondary qualities.
The most important thing
is
the quality of being of the poet, and this
can only be realized by means which are to him the right and inevitable ones and which cannot be dictated by anyone else. For this reason I feel
when I read that the young poets "don't want to write any kind of rhymed poem" or a remark of Auden's which appeared recently in The Times Literary Supplement that today poetry can only be written in a "drab" style. Remarks of this kind can only mean that a certain dismay
those
who make them
want
and
are talking about
what they themselves can write
that they are adding to this that they
do not think any other manner should be written. The manner and means used at a particular moment are held up as the example of the form within which the primary impulse should express itself. This seems to me wrong. The primary impulse of a poet has to discover its own means, which may not be those of other poets, and to state that only certain means can be used is an attempt to dictate the quality of the impulse. The tyranny of a freedom which is held to be only capable of expression in a modish way can be just as inhibiting as the tyranny of an established academic style. The fallacy of academicism here becomes identical with the fallacy of a movement which is opposed to the academic. In both cases the fallacy is to think that at a certain time and place poetry can only be written according to a fixed formula or a fixed refusal to accept any rule. In the one case past conventions are set up as dogma, or
to write;
that anything else in
in the other case, the Zeitgeist.
My argument is that poets are judged on two levels. First— and most important— the level of what they are as sensibility, consciousness, with qualities realized in the poetry, and capable of being analyzed; second, as employers of means. In means I include love of words and ability to play the games of language, without which none, whatever his qualities of soul, can write poetry. Technical skill is means. But also a program, such as refusing to write in rhyme, or even belonging to a poetic clique, or even having a job at a university, or taking drugs, must be counted as means, since all these contribute to a style. I
insist
then on the importance of what a poet
relates to the quality of his being,
though
is
is.
would
Ultimate judgment certainly agree that
and practical criticism relates to his way of doing one keeps the two things— primary essence and means— in mind,
the most useful If
I
possible,
I
think, to feel critical of
some 105
it.
it
of the attitudes of recent schools
Contemporary Poetry of poets reported in Simpson's essay— which
Discussing the young poets
who
"don't
I
take to be representative.
want
write any kind of
to
rhymed poem," Simpson tells us that "There is an accelerating movement away from rationalistic verse toward poetry that releases the unconscious, the irrational, or, if your mind runs that way, magic. Surrealism was buried by critics of the thirties and forties as somehow irrelevant; today it is one of the most commonly used techniques of verse." My objection to this— which
probably puts
me
in the
"somehow irrelevant"— is
realism as
there being a shared subconscious which
many
poets.
For
it
is
who
rank of those
that these poets
is
to
count on
readily accessible to a great
is
confusing to describe surrealism as "a technique,"
unless one considers being "turned on" as a technique.
confusion
think of sur-
seem
like describing falling in love, writing
To my mind
the
poetry for the Muse,
dreaming, or getting drunk as a technique. Surely these are states of
mind induced
in order that the
quires technique. Technique
what was thirties
poet
may
then write poetry which re-
conscious or
is
it
is
nonexistent. In fact,
so dull about surrealist poetry written in the late twenties
(and which surely none can bear to read now)
is
and
precisely that
"turning on," the surreahst trance of disassociation from rational meaning,
was mistaken for technique. The more important part of
my
objection arises from
my
conviction that
poetry puts the reader in touch with the quality of a poet's awareness
and sensibility deriving from his unique self, and that this quality cannot be the same in all poets. The overall term "the subconscious" suggests that all poets have the same inner life and that "surrealist technique" is a way of tapping this so that it pours out in an uninterrupted, undifferentiated flow. A good deal of poetry now being written does seem to presuppose that there are poets who do think this. And, of course, if you regard the basic self within the subconscious as the same in all poets— in the way that gas under the ground tapped by pipes is the same— then the question of secondary means of literary technique becomes irrelevant. To rhyme or bother about meter would merely interrupt the flow, once the "technique" had been found for tapping such a flow. It seems to me that there are two ideas which ought to be resisted. an intellectual game with words. This life, from which the poem originates is simply the occasion for a form of words, and that after the language has been found nothing remains except the verbal play. This is better, of course, than thinking that poetry is self-expression, but
The
first is
the idea that poetry
is
implies that the experience, sensation, impulse in
still it is
not true.
It is
an idea put forward
to
ward
off
the vulgar like
the "mask" or artificial "personae" that poets used to go in for in the 1890's.
While
was writing the preceding page of this essay, by one of those I opened a magazine and my eye happened on a quotation from Wallace Stevens' letters: "With a true poet his I
coincidences that are happy, to fall
106
Stephen Spender is
the
touch
it."
poetry to
same thing
as his vital self. It
is
not possible for anyone else
This answers the "word game" theory of poetry.
answers the theory that poetry
is
It
also
an untapping of the unconscious mind
turned on by "surrealist techniques." Of course, poets write out of dreams,
But the point at which the subconscious bewhich it becomes differentiated as the individual life of the poet, with his "vital self." It may be said that no one would dispute this. But the surrealists did— or some of them did— defend surrealism on poHtical grounds as the communism of the spirit precisely because it was pre-individual, everyone's subconscious. And current ideas of poetry as something that can be "turned on," by drugs, or by the projective verse writers' methods ("a system of breathing and using the typewriter that will enable anyone to write poetry naturally, ."—Louis Simpson) also postulate technique as inwithout thinking vocation, something of the order of table-rapping. Thinking along these lines affects my attitude to current poetry. I do not dismiss poetry which is either academic or anti-academic. I think that both the academic and the anti-academic are means of communication. What matters is that they should in each case be justified as means in their performance and in their communication of a "vital self beyond the means employed, which must realize itself in the words, but which is not just the words but is experience and being communicated through trance, the subconscious.
comes potential poetry
.
is
that at
.
the words.
107
A
V
Antholo
Little
Of Contemporary Poetry
D
AMES UICKEY The Sheep Child Farm boys wild
to
couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees With mounds of earth mounds Of pinestraw will keep themselves off Animals by legends of their own: In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung Say
I
of bams, they have heard tell
That
in a
Way
back
museum
will
in Atlanta
in a corner
somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep
like a
woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol
because
Those things can't live his eyes Are open but you can't stand to look I heard from somebody who .
.
.
But this is now almost all Gone. The boys have taken Their own true wives in the city, The sheep are safe in the west hill Pasture but we who were born there Still are not sure. Are we. Because we remember, remembered In the terrible dust of
108
museums?
Merely with
his eyes, the
Be saying
saying
am
here, in
/
who am
my
sheep child
may
fathers house.
came deeply To my mother in the long grass Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight Listening for foxes. It was something like love I
half of your world,
From, another world that seized her From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out
dew, without ever looking, her best Turned loose, she dipped her face Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound Of sobbing of something stumbling Away, began, as she must do, To carry me. I woke, dying. of
Self to that great need.
summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment The great grassy world from both sides, Man and beast in the round of their need. In the
And
the
hill
wind
stirred in
my
wool,
My I
hoof and my hand clasped each other, ate my one meal
Of
milk,
Staring.
and died
From dark
grass I
came
straight
To my fathers house, whose dust Whirls up in the halls for no reason When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner, And, through my immortal waters, meet the suns grains eye To eye, and they fail at my
I
closet of glass.
am
most surely living In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf And from the chaste ewe in the wind. They go into woods into bean fields they go Dead,
I
Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming They groan they wait they suffer Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.
109
of
me.
Falling A
29-year-old stewardess fell to her death tonight when she was swept through an emergency door that s-uddenly sprang open The body was found three hours after the .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
accident.
—New
York Times
The states when they black out and he there rolhng when they turn To something transcontinental move by drawing moonhght out of the One-sided stone hung off the starboard wingtip some sleeper next to
An
engine
is
groaning for coffee
and there
is
faintly
coming
great
in
Somewhere the vast beast-whistle of space. In the galley with its racks Of trays she rummages for a blanket and moves in her slim tailored Uniform
to pin
it
over the cry at the top of the door. As though she blew
The door down with a silent blast from her lungs frozen she is black Out finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something That no one has even been and lived through screaming without enough air her hat Still neat lipsticked stockinged girdled by regulation Still on her arms and legs in no world and yet spaced also strangely With utter placid rightness on thin air taking her time she holds it In many places and now, still thousands of feet from her death she seems To slow she develops interest she turns in her maneuverable body
To watch
it. She is hung high up in the overwhelming middle of things in her low body-whistling wrapped intensely in all her dark dance-weight Coming down from a marvellous leap with the delaying, dumfounding ease Of a dream of being drawn like endless moonlight to the harvest soil Of a central state of one's country with a great gradual warmth coming Over her floating finding more and more breath in what she has been using For breath as the levels become more human seeing clouds placed honestly Below her left and right riding slowly toward them she clasps it all To her and can hang her hands and feet in it in peculiar ways and Her eyes opened wide by wind, can open her mouth as wide wider and suck All the heat from the cornfields can go down on her back with a feeling Of stupendous pillows stacked under her and can turn turn as to someone In bed smile, understood in darkness can go away slant slide Off tumbling into the emblem of a bird with its wings half-spread Or whirl madly on herself in endless gymnastics in the growing warmth Of wheatfields rising toward the harvest moon. There is time to live In superhuman health seeing seeing mortal unreachable lights far down An ultimate highway with one late priceless car probing it arriving In a square town and off her starboard arm the glitter of water catches The moon by its one shaken side scaled, roaming silver My God it is good And evil lying in one after another of all the positions for love Making dancing sleeping and now cloud wisps at her no
Self
in
110
A
Raincoat no matter all small towns brokenly brighter from inside Cloud she walks over them like rain bursts out to behold a Greyhound Bus shooting light through its sides it is the signal to go straight
Down like a glorious diver then feet first her skirt stripped Up her face in fear-scented cloths her legs deliriously bare
beautifully
then
Arms out she slow-rolls over steadies out waits for something great To take control of her trembles near feathers planes head-down The quick movements of bird-necks turning her head gold eyes the insighta taste for chicken overwhelming
eyesight of owls blazing into the hencoops
Her
the long-range vision of
looped bridges
Freight trains
Through
all
From above.
hawks enlarging enlarging the
the curves of a river
A
all
all human lights of moon racing slowly
cars
the darks of the midwest blazing
rabbit in a bush turns white
the smothering chickens
Huddle for over them there is still time for something to live With the streaming half-idea of a long stoop a hurtling a fall That is controlled that plummets as it wills turns gravity shining Into a new condition, showing its other side like a moon New Powers there is still time to live on a breath made of nothing But the whole night time for her to remember to arrange her skirt Like a diagram of a bat
tightly
it
guides her
she has this flying-skin
and there are also those sky-divers on TV sailing In sunlight smiling under their goggles swapping batons back and forth And He who jumped without a chute and was handed one by a diving Buddy. She looks for her grinning companion white teeth nowhere She is screaming singing hymns her thin human wings spread out
Made
of garments
From her neat shoulders the And she can no longer behold
air
beast-crooning to her
warbling
now
the huge partial form of the world
watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs if she fell plunge Into water she might live like a diver cleaving perfect She
is
heavy
Into another
Element: there
is
Points of diving
silver
water
unbreathable
there
feet together
is
slowing
time to perfect
toes pointed
all
it
lose
saving the fine
hands shaped right
To insert her into the water like a needle to come out healthily dripping And be handed a Coca-Cola there they are there are the waters Of life the moon packed and coiled in a reservoir so let me begin To plane across the night air of Kansas opening my eyes superhumanly Bright
to the
dammed moon
opening the natural wings of
my
jacket
By Don Loper moving like a hunting owl toward the glitter of water One cannot just fall just tumble screaming all that time one must use It
she
is
now
Straightened
New
darks
through with
all
through
all
clouds
damp
hair
the last wisp of fog pulled apart on her face like wool
new
progressions of headlights along dirt roads
And
revealing
from chaos
night a gradual warming a new-made, inevitable world of one's own Country a great stone of light in its waiting waters hold hold out For water: who knows when what correct young woman must take up her body
111
And
fly and head for the moon-crazed inner eye of midwest imprisoned Water stored up for her for years the arms of her jacket shpping Air up her sleeves to go all over her? What final things can be said Of one who starts out sheerly in her body in the high middle of night Air to track down water like a rabbit where it lies like life itself Off to the right in Kansas? She goes toward the blazing-bare lake Her skirts neat her hands and face warmed more and more by the air Rising from pastures of beans and under her under chenille bedspreads The farm girls are feeling the goddess in them struggle and rise brooding On the scratch-shining posts of the bed dreaming of female signs Of the moon male blood like iron of what is really said by the moan Of airliners passing over them at dead of midwest midnight passing Over brush fires burning out in silence on little hills and will wake To see the woman they should be struggling on the rooftree to become
Stars: for her the
then banks
It
Out
ground turns
to face the east,
Do something
is
water
closer
is
nearer
she passes
her sleeves fluttering differently as she
where the sun
with water
fly to it
shall
come up from
fall in it
drink
rolls
wheatfields
it
she must
rise
From it but there is none left upon earth the clouds have drunk it back The plants have sucked it down there are standing toward her only The common fields of death she comes back from flying to falling Returns to a powerful cry the silent scream with which she blew down The coupled door of the airliner nearly nearly losing hold Of what she has done remembers remembers the shape at the heart Of cloud fashionably swirling remembers she still has time to die Beyond explanation. Let her now take off her hat in summer air the contour Of cornfields and have enough time to kick off her one remaining Shoe with the toes of the other foot to unhook her stockings With calm fingers, noting how fatally easy it is to undress in midair Near death when the body still will assume without effort any position Except the one that will sustain it enable it to rise live Not die nine farms hover close widen eight of them separate, leaving One in the middle then the fields of that farm do the same there is no Way to back off from her chosen ground but she sheds the jacket With its silver sad impotent wings sheds the bat's guiding tailpiece
Of her
skirt
the lightning-charged clinging of her blouse
Inner flying-garment of her
Of
slip in
which she
the intimate
rides like the holy ghost
absurd sheds the long windsocks of her stockings then feels the girdle required by regulations squirming she feels the girdle flutter shake Off her: no longer monobuttocked a virgin
Brassiere
and float upward her clothes rising off her ascending and fights away from her head the last sharp dangerous shoe Like a dumb bird and now will drop in soon now will drop
In her
hand
Into cloud
came to Kansas down from all American breath layered in the lungs from the frail thickly Chill of space to the loam where extinction slumbers in corn tassels And breathes like rich farmers counting: will come among them after In like this
the greatest thing that ever
Heights
levels of
all
112
Her
last
superhuman act the last slow careful passing unharmed body desired by every sleeper
All over her
Boys finding for the
Widowed
first
time their loins
farmers whose hands
float
filled
under
hands dream: blood
of her in his
with heart's
light covers to find themselves
the splendid position of blood unearthly drawn Toward clouds all feel something pass over them as she passes Her palms over her long legs her small breasts and deeply between Her thighs her hair shot loose from all pins streaming in the wind Of her body let her come openly trying at the last second to land
Arisen at sunrise
On
her back
This
is it
this All those
gone down
In the soft loam
The furrows
who
find her impressed
driven well into the image of her body
for miles flowing in
upon her where she
lies
very deep
tell nothing But that she is there inexplicable unquestionable and remember That something broke in them as well and began to live and die more When they walked for no reason into their fields to where the whole earth Caught her interrupted her maiden flight told her how to lie she cannot Turn go away cannot move cannot slide off it and assume another Position no sky-diver with any grin could save her hold her in his arms Plummet with her unfold above her his wedding silks she can no longer Mark the rain with whirling women that take the place of a dead wife Or the goddess in Norwegian farm girls or all the back-breaking whores
In her mortal outline
Of Wichita. Breath Quite
All the
it is all
lying
in the earth as
it is
in
cloud
can
known
air above her is not giving up quite one and yet not dead not anywhere else the field on her back sensing the smells
gone
still
in
Of incessant growth Of one eye fading
try to
lift
her
a
little
seeing something
sight left in the corner
wave
lies
believing
That she could have made it at the best part of her brief goddess State to water gone in headfirst come out smiling invulnerable Girl in a bathing-suit ad but she is lying like a sunbather at the last Of moonlight half -buried in her impact on the earth not far From a railroad trestle a water tank she could see if she could Raise her head from her modest hole with her clothes beginning To come down all over Kansas into bushes on the dewy sixth green Of a golf course one shoe her girdle coming down fantastically On a clothesline, where it belongs her blouse on a lightning rod: in this field on her broken back as though on cloud she cannot drop through while farmers sleepwalk without Their women from houses a walk like falling toward the far waters
Lies in the fields
A
Of life in moonlight Toward the flowering
toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms hands that tragic cost Feels herself go go toward go outward breathes at last fully Not and tries less once tries tries ah, godof the harvest in their
US
L OUIS
OIMPSON
Outward The
staff slips
from the hand
Hissing and swims on the polished It
glides
away
It floats like
a bird or
On the waves, And if no god
floor.
to the desert.
lily
who
to the ones
are arriving.
arrives,
Then everything yearns outward. The honeycomb cell brims over
And
the atom
broken
is
in light.
Machines have made their god. They walk or The towers bend like Magi, mountains weep, Needles go mad, and metal sheds a
The
astronaut
Away from
is
lifted
the world, and drifts.
easy
How
easy to be anyone, anything but oneself!
Sinuously
it is
to
be there!
of the plane it
Where
A
is it
is
breathing;
swims through the
On There
something sad about property ends, in California.
It is
the rich
When
.
.
Their
widow-
of whales.
Their
the dogs howl, she howls like a
lives are
to the
ocean
floor.
passing
Slowly under the scrutiny
Of goggle
At night in San Francisco The businessmen and drunkards
down
lives are passing.
There is nothing in those depths But the teeth of sharks and the earbones
.
dog.
Sink
stars.
the Eve
patch of white moving in a crack of the fence
tear.
How
The metal
fly.
exes, in
waves that are vagueh
Connected to women. The women stand up in cages And do it, their breasts in xellow 114
light.
The businessmen
of
San Francisco
It is like
From
Are mildly exhilarated. Lifting their
night in
the
Bay
St.
Petersburg.
a foghorn sounds,
heavy arms and feet
I
And
i
ships,
wrapped
in a mist,
Creep out with their heavy secrets To the war "that no one wants."
They stamp on the ocean floor. They rise from the ooze of the ocean floor To the lights that float on the surface.
American Dreams my
life came toward me. were slender as gazelles. But America also dreams Dream, you are flying over Russia, Dream, you are falling in Asia.
In dreams
My
loves that
.
As
I
On
down
look
my And my
.
the street
a typical sunny
It is
.
day
in California
house that is burning dear ones that lie in the gutter
As the American army Every day
From my
I
wake
enters.
away
far
in a foreign country.
life,
These people are speaking a strange language. It is
strange to
me
And
strange,
think,
I
A Night Grandfather puts
And makes
down
even
in
to themselves.
Odessa Go
his tea-glass
his excuses
It
on, grandfather, hop!
takes brains to live here,
The street-lamps shine through a fog And drunkards reel on the pavement.
Not to be beaten and torn Or to lie drunk in a ditch. Hold on to your umbrella!
One man clenches
He's home.
'And
sets off,
taking his umbrella.
And women They
.
.
on, grasping his umbrella.
path lies near the Suddenly a wolf leaps
Jaws dripping. The
She hurries to get his supper. But when she puts down the dish She presses a hand to her side And he sees that from her hand
forest.
in the path,
man
he opens the door
Her name is Ninotchka, She is young and dark and slender. Married only a month or so.
passionate sounds.
jHis
When
His wife jumps up to greet him.
.
look on calmly.
like those
He walks
anger
his fists in
Another utters terrible sobs
strikes
With the point of his umbrella A howl, and the wolf has vanished. .
.
.
Red drops 115
of blood are falling.
A Son of the Romanovs This is Avram the cello-mender, The only Jewish sergeant In the army of the Tsar. One day he was mending cellos
When
they shouted, "The Tsar
Everyone out
is
coming,
for inspection!"
When
the Tsar saw Avram marching With Russians who were seven feet tall, He said, "He must be a genius, I want that fellow at headquarters."
Luck
A
is
given by God.
wife you must find for yourself.
So Avram married a rich widow lived in a house in Odessa. The place was filled with music Yasnaya Polyana with noodles.
Who
.
.
.
One night in the middle of a concert They heard a knock at the door. So Avram went. It was a beggar, A Russian, who had been blessed By God— that is, he was crazy.
And he
said, "I'm a natural
son
Of the Grand Duke Nicholas."
And Avram said, "Eat. I owe your people a favor." And he said, "My wife is complaining
We
need someone to open the door." So Nicholas stayed with them for years. Who ever heard of Jewish people With a footman?
And then the Germans came. Imagine The scene— the old people Holding on
And
to their
baggage,
the children— they've been told
it's a game, But they don't believe
Then
the
German
says,
it.
"Who's
this?"
Pointing at Nicholas,
"He
doesn't look like a Jew."
And he
said, "I'm the natural son
116
Of the Grand Duke Nicholas." they saw he was feeble-minded, took him away too, to the, death-chamber.
And And
"He could have kept
his
mouth
shut,"
my
Grandmother, "But what can you expect. All of those Romanovs were a Said
little bit
crazy."
Stephen Spender Auden Aetat. XX, LX (To W. H. Auden on his 60th Birthday) You— the young bow-tyed near-albino undergraduate With rooms on Peck Quad (blinds drawn down at midday To shut the sun out)— read your poems aloud In your voice that was so clinical I
it held each word brilliant in forceps your lamp. Images seemed segments
thought
Up On
to
slides
seen through the
iciest of
microscopes
Which showed pale edges round dark Of the West collapsing to farce.
blots
Yet not to be wept over, since the ruins Offered the poet a bare-kneed engineer's
Chance of scrambling madly over scrap heaps To fish out carburettors, sparking plugs,
A
sculptured Hell from a cathedral porch,
Scenes from sagas and a water-logged Lost code. With nicotine-stained fingers
You rigged such junk
new
into strange
machines.
Two met at dawn— riders against the skyline— A spy crouched on the floor of a parched cystern. One with hands
wet reeds (The joking word lobbed bombs Into my dream that was the young Romantic's Praying his wound would blossom to a rose Of blood, bright under an ecstatic moon. Applauding "O!")
Was
that clutched at the
shot, escaping
Forty years later now, benevolent In carpet slippers, you
still
make
devices,
one playing patience, Grumpily fitting our lives to your game Whose rules are dogma of objective Love. Sitting at table like
117
If
Were Not
It
were not for that Lean executioner who stands Ever beyond a door With axe raised in both handsIf it
All
my
days here would be
One day— the same— the drops Of
light edgeless in light
That no circumference Mountain,
star
stops.
and flower-
One with my moment seeing Would— gone from sight— draw back
again
Into their separate being.
Nor would
The
I
hoard against
obliterating desert
Their pinnacles of arctic spar Glittering on the heart.
My To
hand would never
stir
follow through a stone
Hair the wind outlines on sky A moment— and then gone.
What Is
gives edge to
death.
It's
remembering
that shows, curled
Within each falling moment Antony, a world.
An
She came
into the
garden
And walking through deep grass, held up Our child who, smiling down at her, Clung
to her throat, a cup.
Clocks notch such instances
On
time: no time to keep
Beyond the eye's delight The loss that makes it weep. chisel memories Within a shadowy room, Transmuting slips of light I
Launched
into a
to ships
tomb.
118
.
Present Absence You slept so quiet at your end of the room, you seemed memory, your absence. I worked well, rising early, while you dreamed. I thought your going would only make this difference— A memory, your presence.
A
But now I am alone, I know a silence That roars. Here solitude begins.
Mosquito Filigree mosquito
Afloat on black air
Anchors above my headSilver trumpet blowing In the
tomb
of
my
ear:
Angel of Fra Angelico Arousing me, dead.
To thoughts
that
make
Midnight Judgement Day.
Fifteen Line Sonnet
Four Parts
in
I.
When we
talk, I
Beyond the
imagine silence
intervalling words: a space
Empty of all but ourselves face Away from others, alone in the
to face,
intense
would not matter which.
Light or dark,
it
But when
room envelopes
II.
this
us,
one heart.
Our bodies locked together are apart Until we change them back again to speech. III.
Close to you here, looking at you,
I
see
Beyond your eyes looking back, that second you. Of whom your outward semblance is the mirage— Your thought, the word I spoke once, that is true. IV.
Deprived of you,
And
write your
I
stare at this blank
name on
it
to
make
it
page be
Flesh. Here's nothing but a thought, a word.
119
And
rage.
JOHN
R.
PLATT
John R. Piatt obtained his B.S. and M.S. in Physics at Northwestern University and his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Michigan in 1941. He has taught at Minnesota and Northwestern,
and was Professor of Physics and of Biophysics at the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1965. He is now research hiophysicist and acting director of the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, studying the biophysics and structure of neural networks.
He
held a Guggenheim Fellowship at the
University of London in 1952-53 and was given a U.S. Public Health Service Career Award in 1964. He has held offices in the
Division of Chemical Physics of the American Physical Society and has been on the editorial board of the Journal of Chemical Physics and the Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy. Professor Piatt has published over eighty professional papers, largely in the field of electronic structure
and spectra
of organic
molecules but more recently in the field of the biophysics of
and pattern perception. Two reprint collections of Piatt and students have been published, FreeElectron Theory of Conjugated Molecules: A Source Book and
vision
and
his co-workers
Systematics of the Electronic Spectra of Conjugated Molecules:
A
Source Book (both John Wiley, 1964). Dr. Piatt has also published articles in Harper's Magazine,
Horizon, public,
Life
and the
International,
Bulletin of the
Saturday Review, The
Atomic 120
Scientists.
New
Re-
The
New
Biology and
the Shaping of the Future There
be more human evolution
will
in the
next 50 years than in
the last 100,000.-Joshua Lederberg
Today,
great changes are taking place in our
the world.
They
ways of life all over sudden and wide-
are almost certainly the most
spread and dramatic changes that have occurred in any generation in the history of mankind.
A
one-hundred-year-old
man
through the coming of the telephone, the electric
today will have Hved light,
the automobile,
the airplane, the motion picture, and the radio, not to speak of television, nylon, atomic energy, space travel, oral contraceptives, and such principles of social organization as
come
Communism and
the pay-as-you-go in-
tax.
Yet these changes are not merely technological and social changes. In a broad sense they are also biological. For one thing, they of man's biology.
Our
grow out
greatest achievements in science or in large-scale
shaped by biological demands and emotions and human skull. They depend on our curiosity, speech, and reasoning, and on our ability or inability to teach, to learn, to plan, and to work together with other men. But at the same time, these new developments also react back and change man's biology, for they affect his foods and drugs, his houses and habitats, his health and diseases, his population pressures and wars, and his interrelations with the rest of mankind and with all the rest of the biological world of plants and animals that he multiplies or destroys. Biology and technology have interacted before. What we are seeing social organization are
the tissue structure within the
is
only a
modern counterpart
and speech, which occurred, years ago.
It
of the prehistoric invention of tools,
it
is
may be and what fed and
appears that the effort of living with these inventions
what lengthened man's period
of learning in childhood,
forced the steady enlargement of his brain, until today its
fire,
estimated, something like two million
original size. It
was these inventions that began 121
to
it
is
three times
make man human.
The
Today— in
Biological Sciences
the last twenty thousand years, the last two thousand years,
hundred years, the last twentyupon changes, it is hard to believe five years— as we that they are not pressing us toward another similar jump in evolution. For these new technical developments almost necessarily force all mankind to communicate and to interact more and more strongly, to become more and more closely knit together, whether we like it or not. This is producing great new problems and great new national and international stresses. These stresses may yet kill us. But if we have the sense and the will to solve these problems and to learn how to survive together over the next few years, it seems almost inevitable that we will move toward some wholly new form of human organization and interaction around the the last four hundred years, the last one see changes piled
world.
We
are like
men coming
out of the dark house of the past into a world
We have
climbed up out of the dark cellar where we have been trapped for centuries, isolated, ignorant, selfish, combative, and helpless. Suddenly we find ourselves standing on the threshold of a doorway through which we can see a vista of almost incredible knowledge, abundance, and well-being. If we slam the door in our own faces through our traditional national and international selfishness and clumsiness, we may all go down to nuclear extinction. But if we can work with each other to move successfully together through that doorway, we will find in our hands tremendous new powers and potentialities for the full development of the human spirit and a wholly new ability to shape our own future course. In terms of evolution, it will be a quantum jump. of dazzling sunlight.
what
would like to call, at last, the step to Man. at some of our current technical and social changes from this point of view. We can then go on to see what our new scientific developments are telling us about the nature of life and the nature of man as a biological and social and intellectual organism. This will enable us to look more clearly at the possible future or futures of this strange creature, man, and to see how these futures— the possible futures of our own children— might be chosen or shaped or changed into more desirable directions by our choices and actions today. It is
I
Let us look
TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITS examining the areas of recent technical change, we find that two stand out. The first is the fact that the changes today have taken us far beyond the ways of earlier societies. The second is the problem of estimating how much farther— or how little farther— they may take
In features
us in the generations ahead. The changes from the past have been truly enormous. Things are not merely two or three times faster or more pow(Tful than before, but they are changed by many "orders of magni-
122
John R. tude"— that
by many "powers
is,
of
Piatt
10"— so that they go hundreds or
thousands or millions of times beyond the ways of previous centuries. On the other hand, in many areas these vast changes have brought us
world where the only limits are basic physical or economic limits. some areas we are near these limits now, in others they are much farther away than we had ever dreamed, but in both cases we are within sight of a kind of "structural maturity" where the techno-social structures, capacities, and rates of flow that mankind develops in the next few decades may represent the structures and limits that will charinto a
In
human organization for a very long time to come. know that this is a rather surprising conclusion. We are used to the assumption that the rate of change is increasing and that it may go on forever. This may be true in some fields like basic science, biology, and acterize I
where there seem to be no physical limits to our growing knowledge. But in more technological areas, when we discover the finiteness of the speed of light, or conversely the almost infinite supply of nuclear energy, we adapt our technology to these facts, and the adaptation may be almost complete within a generation. Should it surprise anyone that our structures might slow down their rate of change as they reach their natural capacities and limits? Does it surprise us that a boy stops growing physically when he reaches manhood? We have been changing rapidly because we have been passing through an intense and stormy adolescence, and the times may become much calmer as we move toward the structural limits that will determine intellectual creation,
our future It is
state.
show
easy to
that this
Communications—Speed
is
true in one area after another.
communications is a good example. This last century, but it has now leveled off. The change from the 1800's is a change from the speed of horses and ships, in the range of about 10 miles per hour, to the speed of the telephone, radio, and television, or the speed of light, more than two-thirds of a billion miles per hour. The increase is a factor of more than 10", or 10,000,000. But the speed of light is the ultimate limit, since, according to the laws of physics, no matter or energy or signals can ever travel of
has changed incredibly in the
faster than this speed.
The number
communications channels and the coverage of such TV are also approaching limits. Most of the channels are filled, and over half the families in the United States, Russia, and other industrial countries now have telephones, radio, or television, or all three, while the viewing time for TV in American homes now averages of
systems as radio and
several hours per day. vision sets likely that
is
Even
in the
poorer countries the number of
increasing rapidly. Within ten or twenty years,
everyone in the world
may be hooked 123
it
tele-
seems
into the system for as
The
Biological Sciences
many
hours every single day as his taste or his eyesight can stand. Communications networks are like the nerves of our worldwide organism. Great improvements in them may still lie ahead, but it is clear that we are no longer very far from the saturation limits that will characterize this
human
kind of
Travel— In the
interaction for a long time to come.
last
century, travel speeds have increased from roughly
10 miles an hour by horse and 100 miles an hour by train, to 600 miles
an hour by jet plane— with commercial SST planes for about 2,000 miles an hour on the drawing board. This is some two hundred times the speed of horses or ships. For military, business, or personal purposes anywhere in the world, travel time is no longer the most important consideration. Will we go faster? The limit of travel speed in the atmosphere is 17,000 miles an hour if we stay in terrestrial orbit, but men have already done that. It is obvious that human travel over the globe may never be at speeds substantially higher than those already reached.
Even with new kinds matter
how
of vehicles,
it is
remarkable, that would
hard
make
to
imagine any device, no
as great a difference to the
structure of our society today as the railroad, the automobile,
made
and the
horse-drawn ways of previous centuries. Ours is a mobile society and a jet society. One-fifth of all Americans now move their residence every year. The idea of being attached to a single place becomes quaint and backward— a form of cultural deprivation. Civilians airplane
to the
and military personnel are
airlifted
by the
millions overseas
again every year for the price of two weeks' salary.
The custom
and back is
spread-
ing to other parts of the population and to other countries as fast as it. The transformation from a static society to a fully one that will be substantially complete, at least in the
affluence can carry
mobile society West, within
is
this generation.
Exploration— In the
last fifteen years,
men have climbed
to the top of
the highest mountain and have reached the bottom of the deepest ocean.
They have
lived at stations in the Arctic
with running water and hot showers— and only a hundred years ago that
men
and Antarctic
now
all
year around
with nuclear power.
It
was
spent years and risked death to find
the source of the Nile. Today, every square foot of the earth's surface is photographed daily from orbiting satellites. Many regions need to be studied more closely, such as the depths of the oceans, but the great age of exploration is evidently over. The earth is finite, and when we have come to the ends of it, we have come to the ends of it. S])ace travel
—The
first
Sputnik was orbited
in 1957.
Since then,
many
probes have taken close-up pictures of the front side and the back side of the
moon
as well as of
Venus and Mars. Today there are hundreds of 124
John R. Piatt satellites
men
on various missions
flying
around the earth every two hours, and
are preparing to land on the moon. These achievements are due to
the development of rocket speeds
times
beyond anything
and rocket
capabilities thousands of
in previous centuries.
Yet our capabilities in space may also be within sight of a fundamental plateau. Although many great decades of planetary exploration lie ahead, the time it will take to get to the planets is determined by orbit times,
and
will not
Regardless of what
be much shorter than what we can achieve already. new rockets are devised, it will probably always take
days to get to the moon, months to get to Venus, Mars, or Mercury, and years or decades to get to Jupiter or the outer planets.
J.
Computers— The ENIAC, the W. Mauchly and J. P. Eckert
first
electronic computer,
in 1944.
With
this
was
device and
built its
by
much
developed along lines suggested by John von Neumann, the speed of mathematical computation for science or business purposes has increased by about a factor of one milHon, or 10^, over the older faster successors,
"desk calculators" of the 1930s. Calculations in theoretical physics that
may now take less than one may now be in sight. This is because
took a graduate student two years to finish
minute. But some limit in speeds
the signals cannot travel between the parts of a computer faster than the velocity of light. To perform each addition-operation in much less than 10~^ second, or one billionth of a second— about ten times faster
than presently attainable speeds— would require the whole computer to
be much
less
than a foot in diameter, since
this
is
the distance light
Such a reduction of size is possible with "microminiaturization" of all the computer components, but the costs rise steeply and will probably set limits on speed that are no longer very far off. It should be emphasized, however, that the computer field is one where there are complex possibilities not represented by simple measures of speed. Electronic computers are already taking over many operations in science, industry, and government. These include data processing, calculation, bookkeeping, and management problems. But present studies show that they may also have vast new fields of application to programmed instruction in schools, to pattern perception and language translation, and perhaps, in the next twenty or thirty years, to the complete storage and easy retrieval of all the information in all the travels in this time.
books in all the libraries of the world. In their application to intellectual work, computers will be essentially tools and extensions of the human brain and
its
information-processing capabilities, with applications that
can go on growing indefinitely as far as
we can
foresee.
Cost of research— Esich scientific device or method has its natural but in any area of technological invention and application there
limits,
125
The
may
still
Biological Sciences
be "leapfrogging" beyond these
of discoveries or inventions are
made
or as
limits as entirely
new
types
whole new areas of science
are opened up.
On
the other hand, there
is
a fundamental limit to the total level of
support for research and development (R and D). This
is an economic which may have been nearly reached already in the United States. From 1940 to 1966, federal support for R and D increased two hundred times. From 1950 to 1967, the budget of the National Institutes of Health alone increased almost one hundred times. But in the United States in 1967, the total spent on R and D was nearly $24 billion, about 3 percent of the gross national product, and the federal government supplied nearly $15 billion of this. Britain and the Netherlands are now spending more than 2 percent of their national income on R and D. Although it is now obvious how important such a level of spending is for the technical and economic growth and health of a country, it is clear that R and D expenditures are not likely to rise by more than another factor of 2 or so, and that in fact they have already begun to level off because of severe competition from other needs and priorities in our society.
limit
Power.— Two hundred years ago, men changed from animal power to power and started the industrial revolution. In 1942 Enrico Fermi and his co-workers made the first atomic or nuclear pile. In 1967 almost half the new electric plants ordered in the United States were nuclearpowered, and it is estimated by some that within a few years large-scale nuclear fission power may become only one-half to one-fifth as expensive as other forms of energy. The uranium and thorium reserves today are estimated to be enough for the power needs of mankind for roughly a million years, offering something like a thousand times more than the energy estimated to be available in coal reserves before nuclear power came along. This is a case where our breakthrough today is into a world of unbelievable abundance, especially if controlled nuclear "fusion power" can also be developed. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being put into research and development on this question. If success is achieved, it means we can use the almost inexhaustible hydrogen in the oceans for power. This would be an even cleaner and cheaper source than uranium and thorium energy and one available to almost every country. But even without this alternative, it is clear that the step from penury to abundance in energy is one that will be taken all over the world in this generation. coal
Resources.— What about our other resources— minerals, water, and It now appears that we will never run out of minerals. The geochemist Harrison Brown has recently shown that a ton of granite rock food?
contains enough uranium and thorium in trace amounts to equal the
126
John R. Piatt energy of several tons of
This
coal.
is
enough energy to concentrate all still have power left over,
the "trace elements" or minerals in the rock and so that "mining the mountains" in this
men
way can provide
all
the minerals
will ever need.
In the case of water, our problem today
but only of wasteful use and
is
not one of true shortages
enough energy, the rain purifies and
pollution. Eventually, with
and recycle all the water we use— as now. Already, desalination of ocean water with nuclear energy plants has been started, and it promises to provide abundant water in coastal regions all over the world at fairly economical prices. In the case of food resources, however, the picture is very different. Improved seeds and fertilizers have increased productivity in the last century, but not by an order of magnitude, although there has been a
we
will purify
recycles
it
great increase in the
human
efficiency of farming. In
many
countries,
population has been increasing faster than food, and disastrous famines
occur almost every year. If we "farmed the oceans" or if we used nuclear energy to manufacture proteins from coal, the earth might support ten
number of people— or might give the present an undreamed-of abundance— but there is no evidence that men are adequately pursuing such novel sources. We are evidently within sight of "the time of famines" in which food or inertia— or both— will set the limit on population growth and size, or where alternatively we will learn to control population at some lower level where it will not be limited by the food supply. or twenty times the present
level of population
Evolution of plants and animah— It is not generally realized that in century we have essentially reached the end of the era of evolution
this
and animals by natural selection. It is an era which has lasted some three billion years, during which all the forms of life on earth have proliferated. But today evolution by natural selection is giving way to evolution by human selection. The population of every species on the globe is increasingly determined, accidentally or intentionally, by human breeding, protection, predation, or pollution. The wild animals are being of plants
systematically killed, until tigers are
now
left
and
less
it
is
estimated that
less
than three thousand
than two thousand of the great whales. There
and wide areas. Our wastes and chemical poisons and oceans, affecting animals far from human
are fairly successful efforts at total extermination of certain bacteria their insect carriers over
spread through the
air
On the other hand, we are continually breeding new types of food plants and animals, and even new types of fungi to make penicillin settlements.
and other drugs. Undoubtedly the speciation of plants and animals will continue, and the varieties may even become more varied and numerous than in the past— perhaps including the varieties of men!— but they will increasingly 127
The be
varieties
and species
ing deliberately. In the
Biological Sciences
we have
that
new
allowed to
age, evolution
live or that
by accident
we
are breed-
will increasingly
be replaced by evolution by human choice. Disease.— In medicine, the
century also marks the step to the
last
Pasteurian attitude that the causes of diseases can be found and remedied.
why we can control evolution, and why we of disease-causing organisms are now Thousands want known. Where the necessary public-health measures have been taken, infant mortality has dropped by an order of magnitude, and the average length of life has changed from around thirty years to seventy years or more. In just the last two decades, four of the most serious remaining diseases from bacteria and viruses have been almost conquered— tuberculosis by isoniazid, syphilis by penicillin, malaria by mosquito control with DDT, and infantile paralysis by vaccines and killed virus. A chemical cure for the widespread tropical disease bilharzia, or schistosomiasis, has also been reported. The result is that in advanced countries the main causes of death are This
is
part of the reason
to
now
control
it.
disorders of cellular function or control— heart disease, brain strokes,
and cancer.
It is not certain that these can be prevented— indeed there always be some cause of death!— but massive efforts are being made, and it seems certain that we will never again go back to the pre-
will
Pasteurian attitude of fear, superstition, and helplessness toward disease.
Population
growth— The
trouble
is
that while this marvelous control
of disease in the last century has decreased our death rates, birth rates
have not come down nearly
as fast.
As a
now shot up to more than three billion is now between thirty and forty years. In
result,
world population has
people, and the doubling time paleolithic times
it is
estimated
have been about thirty thousand years; so that our rate of increase is now about one thousand times greater than it was for prehistoric man. Obviously such a rate of increase cannot continue indefinitely. A doubling in 40 years means a fourfold increase in 80 years, eightfold in 120 years, and tenfold in 130 years. This would mean an increase from three billion people to thirty billion people by the year 2100, and to three hundred billion people by the year 2230— that is, in a time shorter than the time since the settling of New England. Yet this number would be far beyond the most optimistic estimates of what the world's food supply could support, even with the use of marginal land and farming the oceans. This consideration is quite aside from the question of whether life at one hundred times our present population density could still be called human. Such a level of crowding is no longer an affirmation of life but a denial of all that life might be. We see that the population of the planet, like the weight of a grown to
128
John R.
Piatt
man, must sometime soon begin to level off to a "steady state," whether this is at some upper limit set by starvation, or at the low limit that would be set by nuclear annihilation, or at some intermediate level of wellbeing and decency set by sensible human choice. Some day all men will see that an excessively gross population is like an excessively obese man and shows a lack of control that damages its own humanity and its own potentialities.
But
is
control of population possible?
The answer
is
"yes."
The
oral
and other promising drug and hormone methods of contraception make the problem look orders of magcontraceptive
pill
nitude easier than
The
and the intrauterine it
coil
did even ten years ago. Millions of
women
are taking
dropping rapidly in the United States, and the population already seems to have leveled off in Japan. If birth control can come to be treated as a public health problem, like the control of disease, rather than an individual problem, we might achieve even within this generation the conscious worldwide control of population that all mankind must eventually have for the sake of its health and welfare. "the
pill."
birth rate
is
Nuclear weapons— Turning finally from the technology of life to our most crucial problem today, the worldwide technology of death, we see that the power of bombs and weapons has increased fantastically in the last twenty-five years but has already reached a plateau. In 1944 the greatest bombs were "blockbusters" with about 20 tons of TNT. In 1945 the atomic bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a power equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. In 1953, with the first explosion of a hydrogen or fusion bomb, the power increased to 20 million tons, or 20 megatons, and the Russians later tested a hydrogen bomb of about 100 million tons. This was an increase in power by a factor of over one milliort, or 10^, in ten years. But while it is not technically impossible for the power of bombs to increase further, even militarily it would be a waste of material, since at this level of destruction ten small bombs can destroy a larger area and can be more "effective" than one large bomb. We have also reached a kind of plateau in the area of "overkill," since both the Russians and the Americans now have enough megatons of nuclear weapons in their arsenals to destroy not only themselves but all life on the planet several times over— with the equivalent of more than 10 tons of explosive for every man, woman, and child alive today, as John F. Kennedy once put it. How can we worry more? The worst is already here.
Control of nuclear weapons— Yet this means that we may also be near a great step in the control of nuclear weapons and the reduction of terror,
or
simply because the present situation cannot continue. Every year
two now there
is
some major
international confrontation of the nuclear
129
The powers— Korea,
Biological Sciences
Cuba, Vietnam, Israel, last month's a danger of nuclear threats, nuclear accident, and nuclear escalation. B-52's with hydrogen bombs are continually cruising the skies, and Polaris missile submarines hide in the seas. Even though men have worked very hard in each of these crises to avoid disaster, there is always a risk of misunderstood orders or accident, or a dictator ready to commit suicide and pull the world down with him. It is a kind of "nuclear roulette," like spinning the chamber of a revolver with one bullet in it, putting it to your head, and pulling the trigger. Even if you escape the first time, or the second, or the third, it finally, certainly, kills you. If the probability of being killed is only 10 percent each time, it adds to more than 50 percent in a few trials. Then why do I say we are near a limit in the control of nuclear weapons? Simply because no one lives very long under these conditions. Either in ten or twenty years, or in thirty or forty, we will have fallen over the edge of the precipice, or else we will have found some way to pull back from it by collective agreement or collective rationality of some kind, so that the dangers will be very considerably less, and the world will have some chance of continuing, perhaps, for one hundred or two hundred years. This might give us time to work out still better safeguards to keep from threatening and killing each other, so that we might begin to hope for survival of the human race for two thousand years, or twenty thousand years, say as long as the time since agriculture. crisis,
whatever
This
is
Berlin, Suez, Laos,
it
was— where
there
is
not a particularly cheerful view.
It sees
the
human
race today as
confronted with a very short half-life and with an inescapable choice of
whether
to
go on
in the old
proud dangerous ways or yield enough
The point
organize internationally for survival. the time of choice.
The
that
is
will
be determined by the
is
the hinge of history.
or thirty years,
We
decision of whether
efforts of
In this aspect, then, as in
all
men
it is
we
in the next
this
if
we
live or die forever
few
years.
can survive for the next twenty
into a high-technology
ing across the solar system, with
new
world society reachand hope and keep itself alive and
levels of well-being
fulfillment— a society that might find out
how
to
evolving for thousands or millions or billions of years. This "step to will
to
generation
the other aspects, the present generation
see that
we can move
is
that
be a transition to a new stage in biological and But the time for the decision is now.
social
and
Man"
intellectual
evolution.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAN have we come By and Howmade them, and then they made man. The to this place?
tools
fire
and speech.
Man
invention of tools some
two million years ago, according to the findings of L. S. B. Leakey in his Olduvai Gorge excavations, may have led to several of our biological 130
John R. Piatt changes, including right-handedness and the development of opposed
thumbs useful for grasping. The concentration of attention on making tools and handling fire, especially to solve the problems of survival in cold and marginal habitats during the last Ice Ages, undoubtedly led to an increase in man's cunning and problem-solving abilities and in the size and complexity of his brain, especially in the visual area. Similarly, the invention of speech, with its great power for reporting and analysis, may have led to the survival of men with progressively larger speech areas in the brain.
Fire
may have played
a major role in the development of our cultural prolonged the day into long idle evenings when a around the fire telling stories. The effect of this on the
characteristics, as
it
group could sit development of speech, symbolism, and systematic language, and on the new inventions of poetry, song, myth, and history, and the systematic teaching of skills, arts, and cultural transmission, must have been enormous. This learning situation around the fire may also have helped to lengthen our childhood. The great apes are fully adult by the time they are six
years old, and perhaps the early
men
were, too. But man's prolongation
and teaching by The brother or sister who married at age six to live separately in the woods was probably handicapped relative to the ones who matured later and had another year or two at home to practise with fire-tools and arrowheads and making clothes. Obviously, in such a protective teaching system, the parents of a baby have to live long enough for the baby to reach puberty himself, so it may of childhood permits an increased duration of protection
the family which has considerable survival value.
be no accident that the age of puberty today, at about twelve or thirteen for the well-fed, is about half the mean length of life of about twentyeight years which was characteristic of most of the world until this century.
Are such changes still going on as fast as ever? This is hard to prove, but it seems likely. A threefold increase in brain size in the last two million years would mean only about a one percent increase in the last twenty thousand years, which is too small to measure archeologically with accuracy. But when Julian Huxley listed "the six greatest biological inventions"— clothes, the domestication of plants, the domestication of animals, the fermentation of alcohol, the control of disease,
contraceptives— he noted that the at least tions,
first
twenty thousand years ago.
and
artificial
four were prehistoric, dating from
It is
hard
to believe that these inven-
ushering in stable farms and towns and non-portable wealth, have
not changed man as they have changed his plants and animals. And the changes continue. The last two of these inventions were made in the last century, and they have already affected biology enormously. In fact, Western
men have
increased in stature by several inches in
131
The
Biological Sciences
the last few centuries and by one or two inches in the last generation.
Most of us are now too large to fit into the fourteenth-century suits of armor in the museums. This is supposed to be the result of reduced childhood disease and better diets. It would be remarkable if these physical changes in our era were not accompanied by corresponding changes in brain growth and capacity as well. A further increase in the length of childhood may also be in the offing. Everywhere today the advantage of delayed marriage in terms of family economics and ability to provide for the children is easy to see. In the slums, early childbearing
is
partly responsible for the high death rate,
while in the upper classes marriage
is
often delayed into the twenties to
permit advanced education and advanced earning power. average length of
life
be delayed among reflect that It
many
intellectuals
until
of our geniuses "act as
reminds one of
With the come to
increasing to over seventy, might puberty
how immature
a
their
thirties?
It
is
amusing
to
though they had never grown up."
human
child
would seem among the
six-year-old adult chimpanzees.
The inventions today
that are the successors to the invention of fire
are the use of coal and steam power, electric power, and
power. As the successors to
tools,
today
we have
great corporations multiplying tools, goods,
now
atomic
and and weapons and making a factory system
them cheap and available everywhere. As the successors to speech, we have printed books, radio, movies, and television, multiplying knowledge, communication, and empathy a billionfold around the world. In the long run, these will undoubtedly make as great changes in human biology and organization as fire and tools and speech made two million years ago. It is
only recently that
we have been
able to look back into the past
make such comparisons. But now we can open successive larger and larger vista of time and space. Our own develop-
scientifically to
doors onto a
broader perspective by observing that the whole been has a kind of exercise in problem-solving by ever
ments can be put evolution of
life
in a
more sophisticated organisms. Three methods of problem-solving have now been developed. The first is problem-solving by survival. This is the method of the insects and the lower animals, where the individual organisms are genetically "preprogrammed" or predetermined in their behavior and are unable to learn anything or to change their behavioral patterns during their indi-
vidual lifetimes. Collectively, however, the species as a whole can "learn," because the individuals that survive and pass their heritage on to their descendants— the gray moths on the tree trunk, say, rather than those that stand out because they are too white or in their
chromosomes and
black— are those that embody
their heredity the genetic variations that are
necessary to "solve" their problems and survive.
The second method
of problem-solving
132
is
problem-solving by indi-
John R. Piatt
came with the development of nervous systems and enabhng the individual organism to solve problems by confronting danger and experience short of death. A learning animal could draw back from the cliff before he fell over and could look ahead and behind and associate things of value to survival. The first of these problem-solving methods is "phylogenetic"— problemsolving by the species as a whole. The second is "ontogenetic"— problemsolving by the individual. In the last few hundred years we have acquired a third method, problem-solving by anticipation; that is, by science— by analysis and prediction. Rudiments of this method have been with us since the invention of language and thought, but today it has become the most powerful tool of civiHzed man. It is a method which can solve problems in advance, often before they happen, and sometimes even before they have ever happened to anyone. And occasionally, what is most difficult vidual learning. This brains,
of
all, it
can solve problems even while they are in progress, with feed-
back loops and mechanisms.
Thus when the
"cybernetic"
control
mechanisms
or
goal-directed
Sputnik was sent up,
it did not just happen to go was the only one of thousands of Sputniks that survived. And it did not try a high path and then a low one, learning by trial which one was too fast or too slow. Problem-solving by survival or by trial-and-error learning would have been too wasteful. No: the Sputnik went into the correct orbit on the first try because the development of science had enabled the laws of physics to be discovered, which permitted the calculation of the trajectory in advance and the construction of a feedback control-system to steer in the chosen direction and to turn
first
into the proper path because
off
it
the rocket motors at the right time to reach the preset path.
The methods
by
which emphawhich emphasizes the present individual and his experience; and by anticipation, which emphasizes the planned shaping of the future. That is, by the species; by the individual; and then by science. Or we could say that they are by the DNA, the hereditary material in the chromosomes of the cells; by the neurons, the connected cells of the brain; and then by computers and cybernetic process-control programs, the artificial electronic networks that our brains have set up. As the DNA created the cells of the brain, so the brain has now created equations and computers
sizes
of problem-solving are thus
survival,
the accidental heritage of past individuals;
by
learning,
to solve them.
We
have now stepped up onto the third step of this evolutionary we are skillful and wise, it is now possible to anticipate and to shape physical, biological, and social futures which have never existed before, and to seize golden opportunities, and to solve deadly problems sometimes even before we come to them. It is fortunate that this is so, because we have indeed come into a world progression. If
133
The
Biological Sciences
new and deadly problems such as have never They cannot be solved by any other method than by scientific analysis and anticipation, and they will almost certainly destroy us if we wait to learn how to solve them in the old way by living through of
new
opportunities and of
existed before.
them.
We can see the main reason for our new difficulties if we utilize "general systems theory," which deals with the analogies and differences between living
systems at different levels of organization, such as a
cell,
organism, a family, an industrial organization, or a nation. These are
an all
systems which develop, so to speak, from within, and which have integrative feedbacks or decision structures that tend to prevent any great destructive tension between the component parts fairly well-integrated
throughout
The
all
the stages of growth.
that the world today is not a development of this kind but something more like an intersection of competing systems. The groups and nations that are colliding today have not been developed as parts of an integrated organism with a single tested set of genetic in-
trouble
is
Conthem have no counterpart
structions for relating the parts, or with established decision rules.
sequently, the pressures and conflicts between
growth of an organism, and the question is whether adequate and decision rules can be adopted before the tension destroys the whole undertaking. Possibly our new understanding of systems organization, and of social and political problem-solving by anticipation, can be translated into a workable solution in time, but the in the
protective interactions
time
is
This
short.
moment
of decision has
arrived with startling suddenness on
by repeating a comparison which made, between the history of life and the height of
the evolutionary scale. This can be seen Julian Huxley St. Paul's
first
Cathedral. If the three billion years or so of
life
are represented
more than 300 feet, each foot represents roughly ten million years. The two million years of man is about the height of a 2-inch block lying on top of the roof. The twenty thousand years since agriculture began is about the thickness of a postage stamp on top of the block. The four hundred years of modern science and industry is the thickness of the ink on the postage stamp. And the thirty to fifty years from the coming of atomic energy and television and space travel to the time when we must make a more stable organization
by the height
of the Cathedral,
of the world, or perish,
is
which
is
only the thickness of the film of moisture on
top of the ink.
This almost instantaneous step to a viable survival, this step to
and a new world. set up these new
If
Man,
is
we can manage
structures,
it
human
organization for
essentially the creation of a
will
to
keep from
make
new
species
killing ourselves as
we
us participants in the most in-
credible event in evolution, as the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin
134
John R. Piatt emphasized. This step differs— in its suddenness, its global character, its its order-of-magnitude changes, and its requirements for conscious planning— from everything that has gone before. All of biological control,
evolution
up
to
now
has been but prologue.
THE RANGE OF LIFE Life may ical
not be nearly as unusual as
it
was thought
teenth century. Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and
j
elements necessary for
combining elements
when
a
star,
life
we know
as
in the universe.
it— are
The astronomers
to be in the nineoxygen— the chemthe most abundant
are
now
saying that
or sun, condenses out of the dust clouds in interstellar space
be self-luminous from the nuclear reactions in it, some of may condense around it into planets. In the flux of radiation from the sun, the chemical elements on the surface of a planet can form more and more complex molecules. The picture of how these might build up to life was developed by A. I. Oparin in the 1930's. Later, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller showed experimentally that a simple electric discharge, through a mixture of small molecules like methane, ammonia, and water, produced many of the amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins in living cells. Even more complex molecules, such as the nucleic acids and porphyrin, which is the basis of the chlorophyll in green plants, have now been made by such methods. The same result could be obtained by ultraviolet radiation from the sun, although
and begins
to
the remaining dust
more
slowly.
Oily hydrocarbons have
now been found
in meteorites,
and the question
being studied whether they have been formed in this pre-biological way or whether they are of biological origin. Either possibility would be
is
extremely interesting.
moon and Mars
A
search for complex molecules on the surfaces of
under way. Very complex molecules are still, of course, a long way from the
the
is
also
self-reproducing or "self-catalytic" processes that are necessary to
life.
Many
experimental and theoretical studies are under way to see how this gap could have been bridged and whether it takes a billion years of sunlight under conditions on the primitive earth or can be bridged more quickly today in the laboratory. Some bacteria-like structures have recently been found in rocks 2.7 billion years old, but it seems certain that there must have been pre-cellular stages that go back much closer to the origin of the earth 4.5 billion years ago, although concrete evidence for
may be hard to find. Some have speculated that life
such stages
elsewhere, at different temperatures and
pressures, might involve "exotic chemistry," such as the use of
compounds and
reactions in such systems
135
now
ammonia
but the possible appear to be rather
in place of water, or silicon chains in place of carbon,
The Biological Sciences limited.
On
the other hand,
life as
we know
it
survives over an astonish-
ing range of conditions. Viruses and bacteria can survive long exposures
vacuum and
to temperatures near absolute zero. Algae and bacteria from below the freezing point to near the boiling point of water, and worms and arthropods are even found at pressures of 1,000 atmospheres at the bottom of the Pacific. The search for living systems, perhaps at the poles of Venus or in hot springs on Mars, or perhaps at the warm bottoms of the cold atmospheres of the outer planets like Jupiter and Saturn, now seems quite reasonable to many chemists and biologists and is one of the most interesting aspects of the space program. The basic chemical elements are the same everywhere. Should it surprise us if the functional and self-reproducing organic compounds and combinations also turn out to be the same everywhere? We are made of the dust of the universe, and it may be more familiar than we have been
to
live
willing to admit.
Even the shapes of creatures elsewhere might not be so ours. The shapes of organisms tend to fit the symmetry
different
of their
from
mode
of life. Organisms floating in water tend to be round. But swimmers and burrowers that have a directed motion have a head and a tail; and the sensory organs, the nose and eyes and the mouth, are all at the head end where they encounter new environments first. Crawlers over a surface have a belly and a back, with the back more heavily protected. Flyers,
whether birds or This
is
bats, all
have rather similar wings
to beat the air.
"convergent evolution," and the explanation for
ways
it is
that there
no matter where you start from. Will the Martians or the creatures from Alpha Centauri look like us, as the science-fiction movies suggest? This general systems theory suggests that the answer is probably "yes." We know many varieties of solutions to the problem of life, from the slime mold to the Sequoia, and from the ladybug to the peacock and the whale, but they fit within these general regularities, and it is therefore hard to imagine any forms of organic life elsewhere that could be much more bizarre than things we have seen already. Will there be higher forms of life elsewhere that can communicate with us? No one knows, but there is no reason to believe that evolution' in some other places may not be just as advanced as ours or even far ahead. The trouble is that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is so vast that even if it contained millions of such centers of life, the nearest one might still be hundreds of light-years away. But such questions are no longer far from the minds of modern astronomers, as losif Shklovskiy and Carl Sagan have emphasized. Radio astronomers have recently searched for signal-like emissions at various wavelengths. They are intrigued by some peculiar Oll-molecule emissions that suggest some kind of high-intensity "laser" sources, and more recently by triplet pulses every 1.33 seconds are only certain
to solve certain problems,
136
John R.
Flatt
Ill-megacycle band from a point near Vega. A space beacon, perhaps? We may be the galactic babies who have just realized that the parents are saying words. But, of course, any intelligent beings elsein the
where might have methods of high-intensity communication that are still hundreds or thousands of years beyond any technology that we can detect or understand today. All this suggests that even the process of evolution itself should
be
looked at from a larger point of view. Joshua Lederberg has divided the
which he chemogeny
possible evolutionary processes into three sequential stages, calls "chemogeny," "biogeny," and "cognogeny."
The
stage of
complex molecules Biogeny would begin when the abundance of different molecules begins to be dominated by self-amplifying processes,
would be the
early stage of preorganic evolution of
in a star's radiation field.
with natural selection.
On
the earth this stage
would include
all
of our
from the one-celled and the many-celled plants and animals up until the appearance of man. The era of cognogeny in any evolutionary system would begin with symbolic and technical understanding and manipulation. That is, it would begin on earth with the appearance of speech, brains, and scientific control, as man begins to dominate the world and its plants and animals and to shape the course of evolution deliberately. On an evolutionary timescale, we are still on the uncertain threshold of this era. It is interesting to realize that the "creatures" of the cognogenic era no longer need to be limited to biological cells and protoplasm. The astronomer Fred Hoyle suggested in The Black Cloud that the sensorymotor networks of a higher organism might be organized into a huge dust cloud in space, with radio waves for nerve signals and magnetic fields for muscles. We would not know how to create such a vast system, but we do know how to create increasingly sophisticated automatic systems, sensory-motor decision-systems or "cybernetic organisms," on our own evolution,
scale.
The Surveyor landing devices that are now photographing and digging up and analyzing the surface of the moon and sending back information are automata of this kind. Exploratory development has also been started on a larger "Automated Biological Laboratory," or ABL, for exploring the surface of Mars in an even more sophisticated way. This would be a large vehicle with wheels, a nuclear power source, and microwave communication back to earth. It would contain telescopes, microscopes, manipulators, and a complete analytical laboratory directed by its own computer. It would be stabilized so it could move over the landscape to dig up samples, and the hope is that it would then be able to make automatically any analysis or microbiological study that can be done today in a terrestrial laboratory. In fact, the cost of developing such a device might pay off handsomely, not only in the development of automata for haz-
137
The ardous work, but also
Biological Sciences
showing how
in
automate our own biochemical
to
laboratories.
The value
ABL
in the flexibility and "intelligence" of magnitude more valuable than a preprogrammed system because it could change its analyses with new information, and it could be re-programmed to do new experiments and answer new questions that are not thought of until months or years after it had been sent off on its mission. What would an ABL look like to a Martian? Like some kind of jointed, animate creature, with internal energy, arms, eyes, ears, strange feeding habits, and peculiar but directed behavior. Although it could not yet reproduce itself, it is no longer impossible for us to see how to program such a creature to do so. (On earth, it would only have to type out orders to various factories for all of its component parts and fit them together in assembly jigs when they arrived.) The age of cognogeny has taken us beyond neural networks to a worldwide communications network of knowledge. We see that it is also taking us beyond the age of protoplasm to the age of electronic automata which will handle more and more of the work and science of the world. As our biological cells long ago began to "secrete" and assemble our own neural networks, so we now have begun to secrete automated systems, their designers, slaves, and masters. It may be another case of convergent evolution, happening everywhere in the universe.
the device.
of the
It
concept
would be orders
is
of
THE MOLECULAR BASIS OF LIFE
Today
we
are also opening successive doors onto the inner working
One
of living systems.
of the greatest scientific discoveries of this
century was the discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 of the detailed structure and function of the molecule that carries the hereditary information in the chains are copied cell
make
short
when
RNA
This
DNA DNA story,
a cell divides, and
chains which
every elementary biology ical
cells.
text.
The
make
DNA
how
the
of
how
DNA
protein chains,
the long
DNA
chains in each is
now
told in
chains carry the primary chem-
information code or message in the form of a sequence of special
nucleic acid base groups along the chain. aries, this
message
is
Through the
RNA
intermedi-
translated into the specific sequences of twenty differ-
ent amino acids in the protein chain. This chain determines
what happens
because the proteins are the enzymes or catalysts of all the chemical reactions of a cell. They are the specific assembly jigs, wrenches, and tools that bring together the molecular parts to be joined or cut. They determine the specific metabolism of each cell and the building up of all
in the cell,
of
membranes, and secretions. The control mechanisms which "turn on" the making of proteins when its
subcellular particles,
138
John R.
Piatt
they are needed were worked out by Frangois Jacob and Jacques Monod.
The sequence
of events
is
under feedback control by certain "repressor
DNA at the "operator" region that begins each protein message, or "gene." Thus when a certain kind of protein molecule is needed, say, to digest a certain sugar, an incoming sugar molecule reacts with the repressor for that protein, the sugar acting as an "inducer" which releases the repressor from the DNA and allows that molecules" which bind on to the
section of the
DNA
to
"positive feedback" in
open up so that the protein can be made. This is making the protein enzyme. Other enzymes are
by "negative feedback." The histidine-making enzymes, for example, are turned on all the time until excess histidine builds up and turns them off by reacting with their repressor controls. Some of the genes make repressor molecules to control other genes, and the "reading out" of controlled
the information from one set of genes to the next
is
out the pages of a book in succession during a
very
much
cell's life
like
reading
cycle,
where
each page tells (by the repressor or inducer substances it makes) what page to turn to next. This whole field has been moving very fast, with many exciting discoveries about the details of the mechanisms. Walter Gilbert and his coworkers have now isolated the first repressor substance in a bacterium and
have shown it to be a protein, as predicted. Marshall Nirenberg and others have now shown that the "code" for translating the DNA sequence of bases into the protein sequence of amino acids (three bases per amino acid) appears to be universal, with the same code in bacteria, yeast, and rat liver cells. Whether this code is inevitable because of some peculiar physical chemistry requirement, or whether it is just an "evolutionary accident" that has been frozen into the codes of all the organisms here on earth, is still being debated. Another exciting recent finding is that with the right cellular extracts whole DNA and RNA genetic chains can be faithfully reproduced in the test tube. This has been shown by Sol Spiegelman with the RNA viruses (whose hereditary chains are made of RNA rather than DNA), and he was able to set up an "evolutionary system" in the test tube, with the RNA copying itself and mutating and changing as the days passed. Arthur Kornberg and his co-workers were also able to copy the DNA of a bacteriophage in a test tube so accurately that when the new DNA chains were injected into bacteria, they destroyed the bacteria and made new phage particles indistinguishable from the original phage. These systems still require complex enzymes and ribosomes that we do not know how to construct, and they require the use of DNA or RNA chains taken from existing organisms since we do not know how to "write" the long chemical information sequences that are needed to make viable cells. Nevertheless, these discoveries are an important step toward "making life in a test tube," and this process may be not more than a decade away. 139
The
Biological Sciences
Many amino acid sequences of proteins have now been worked out. They have to be highly specific, but it is found that they change with evolution. Cytochrome C, for example, is the name of an almost universal enzyme concerned with cellular respiration. It contains 104 amino acid units, which are determined by a sequence of 312 nucleic acid base units. With respect to cytochrome C, the difference between man and the rhesus monkey is that one base in this sequence of 312 (and one amino acid) have been changed by a mutation; between man and the horse, 12 units have changed; between man and the chicken, 14; between man and the tuna fish, 22; and between man and the yeast cell, 43. In each case these numbers seem to be related to the approximate time since the two evolutionary Hues diverged, with something Hke ten million years to establish each additional change in the nucleic acid sequence in such a molecule of about one hundred amino acid units. We see that man only differs from yeast— at least in his gene for cytochrome— by about 43 bases out of 312, or by about 15 percent; but of course any greater differences might not have been viable. Sometimes a single base change in the sequence can be quite lethal,
being required
as in the case of sickle-cell anemia, a genetic recessive disease of the
blood which has been shown to be due to a single mutation in the hemoglobin molecule. Mutations at some fifty different positions out of about
one thousand on the hemoglobin genes have now been discovered in various rare blood diseases in humans. If all of our thirty thousand or more enzymes were examined, each person would be found to carry dozens of such deleterious mutations— a fact which makes any eugenics program very difficult. The relation of large molecule sequences to their spatial structure and their biological function is an area of study that is becoming increasingly important. A protein with a known primary sequence of amino acids twists and folds itself into certain spatial shapes, or "secondary" and "tertiary" structures, which are somehow able to select and find the specific
molecules that the protein catalyzes or reacts with. The proper-
beyond do not yet understand the laws of this behavior, either for enzymes or for structural and muscle proteins or for other biological polymers such as the polynucleotides and polysaccharides; and, in a sense, this is the central problem of biochemties of
a protein molecule or any other large molecule thus go far
the properties of
istry for the
its
chemical subgroups.
We
next ten years.
The question can be put
in the following form: Given the primary amino acid sequence of a protein, what will be its secondary and tertiary folding, and what molecules will be bound to it? Or conversely, given a molecule that we wish to cut or to join to something else, what possible amino acid sequences would be required to do the job? If the laws for predicting this can be found, they might play a role in biochemistry
140
John R. Piatt
by valence theory in organic chemistry a hundred would enable us to predict reactions of proteins or structures and tell us how to design new amino acid se-
similar to that played
years ago, since they alternative
quences
to carry
out desired reactions.
Many
the fixation of nitrogen, are done easily at
enzymes, and
it
would be
difficult reactions,
room temperature by
a great step forward
if
we
such as catalytic
could learn the
rules for creating such catalysts ourselves.
The discovery of such laws would also help us to understand the widespread phenomenon of "complementarity" between biological molecules, such as that between enzyme and substrate, between antigen and antibody, or between inducer molecule and repressor substance. These interactions are far more specific than the familiar chemical complementarity between acids and bases. It may be that every kind of molecule or from every other kind in its shape, polarity, some long complementary chain that will wrap around or bind better to it than to any other molecule— but we cannot yet predict what this long chain is. The search for these laws of behavior is now well under way with biochemical, sequence, and X-ray studies of the tertiary structures of proteins, as well as with studies using molecular models. The complete X-ray structures of myoglobin and hemoglobin were first worked out several years ago by John Kendrew and Max Perutz, and those of several other proteins are also now known, including lysozyme which has been worked out by David Phillips and A. C. T. North. Francois Jacob and his co-workers showed that the binding of proteins usually requires that they be "allosteric"— having two or more different forms between which they can flip back and forth. It is therefore interesting to find that lysozyme, which destroys cell walls by cutting their polysaccharide chains, holds the chains in a slot and cuts them with an in-out chemical action somemolecular combination
and
affinities. If so,
what
differs
there must be
like a conductor's ticket-punch.
How
does the molecular biology of a multicellular organism differ from that of a single cell? A bacterial cell {Escherichia coli) contains strands of DNA about one millimeter long. These have about three million bases, since the bases in the chain are about 3.4 angstroms apart. This is enough to make five thousand different enzymes of the usual size. In each cell of a human being, however, the DNA is packed into forty-six chromosomes (twenty- three pairs). Its total length, if stretched out end to end, would be about two meters, about the height of a man. This represents about 6 X 10^ bases, which is about thirty times the number of letters in the Encyclopasdia Britannica, or enough to specify the structures of about ten million proteins or enzymes if this were all structural information. (Since there are roughly it is
interesting to reflect that the
end
to end,
would reach
DNA
10^-^ cells
across the solar system.)
141
in a
in all these cells,
if
human body, stretched out
The
A
multicellular organism starts from a single fertilized egg
such a into
Biological Sciences
cell
many
grows and divides repeatedly,
it
cell,
but as
develops or differentiates
different specialized tissues— as in the heart, liver, eyes, skin,
now appears that all the genetic information is copied on each division and that each adult cell or somatic cell in a multicellular organism contains the full DNA genetic information necessary for the and
so on. It
development of the whole organism. However, only a tiny part of this information is being "read out" at a given time, and this part differs from one tissue or organ of the body to another and it changes in each tissue during the course of development.
would appear that the process of control of this read-out is again Jacob-Monod mechanism. The different tissues communicate with and regulate each other by sending inducers, repressors, or hormones back and forth. Certain tissues send out the inducers for starting It
similar to the
the development of other tissues around them. Thus, a piece of lens tissue from a chick or mouse implanted on the back of a chick or mouse embryo will cause an extra eye to develop around it, and the eyelid will even blink if one of the normal eyes is touched by a hair and made to blink. This shows that the extra eye has the right chemistry to grow some of the right connections to the brain, even though it has no vision. In the same way, an implant of limb-bud tissue in an embryo will start an extra arm or leg growing from that point, as Roger Sperry has shown with frog tadpoles.
The nervous connections
to the brain are again functionally
identical with the connections of the adjacent
normal
legs.
The inducer molecules are evidently small enough to be relatively nonspecific, common to mouse as well as chick, although they are specific for
the organs induced; but the organ induced, the eye or leg,
is
"species-specific," characteristic of the host animal, not of the inducer, just as
expected from the Jacob-Monod model of control. The male and
female sex hormones are familiar cases of inducers, and they can control the development of specific sex organs in an animal or are injected into,
any young
mammal
at the
if
they are present
in,
proper stage of develop-
ment. Recently Carroll Williams has also identified a "juvenile hormone"
molecule which maintains the insects in their larval and which may be very valuable in insect and disease control.
in insects— a small
stage
The idea
that the
DNA
in a cell's
nucleus controls
has been modified by Ruth Sager and others
may
all
the inheritance
who have shown
that there
be some "non-chromosomal inheritance." Preexisting membrane structures, for example, may be needed to guide the distribution of a cell's chemicals, as Tracy Sonneborn has stated. And some DNA or RNA chains may be found outside the nucleus as in the green chloroplast particles that do the photosynthesis in green plants. These particles may be intruding organisms that invaded their host cells long ago, later acquiring a symbiotic relationship with them. also
142
r
John R. Piatt This possibility is of special interest because it is now coming to be widely believed that cancer may be produced by viruses that invade cells in somewhat this way and then lie dormant for years, perhaps by
merging with the cell's own chromosomes. Many animal cancers are certainly produced by viruses, such as the Rous sarcoma virus of chickens and the polyoma virus that can produce cancer in many different organs in mice. The virus may finally be released by mutations or by chemical carcinogen molecules, somehow causing the host cells to go into uncontrolled multiplication. These ideas are far from proved, but they are suggestive and testable, and they have brought new hope of solving the cancer problem.
These new models of genetic "read-out" and cellular control are giving much clearer picture of the chemical and informational organization that makes possible the integrated functioning and survival of the whole organism. The fruits of this new knowledge, when applied to human growth and disease, may be very great indeed. us a
BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR Complexity— Fhysics
and chemistry are relatively "low-information" compared to biology. Physics deals with a small number of universal equations and with about one hundred fundamental particles. Chemistry has about one hundred elements and about one million molecules. The problems in these fields do not change very rapidly with size. A small crystal has almost the same properties as a large one, and an apple is aflFected by gravity in much the same way as the moon. Biology, on the other hand, is a "high-information" subject, where things get far more complicated. It has roughly one million species, each with many individual variations, and the genetic information in each of them is represented by about 10^ to 10^*^ bases, an error in any one of which may be lethal, as we have seen. The information or variety of subjects
properties in a biological system increases in proportion to the size of the
DNA
chain or the
The plexity.
number
brain, however,
is
of genes.
the richest system of
The human brain
is
all in
meaningful com-
estimated to contain some 10^ \ or one
hundred billion, nerve cells, with an average of something like one thousand interconnections or "synaptic junctions" per cell. These figures are quite uncertain, but they indicate a total of the order of 10^* synapses
whole brain. These numbers are so large that they would permit new neurons or thirty thousand new synapses every second for a hfetime without being used up. It may be significant that in man the amount of information that can be learned by experience, as represented perhaps very roughly by the number of neurons, finally goes beyond the amount of information in the DNA chains. There is
in the
the encoding of thirty
143
The
Biological Sciences
probably a good deal of repetition or redundancy in the connections, but it is clear that the problems of the brain are of the highest order of complexity. They may continue to be studied for centuries after physics and chemistry have become as simple as high school geometry. Sleep.— In all this complexity, there are several sharply marked forms ot mental behavior that have always puzzled men. These include sleep and dreams, epilepsy, schizophrenia, hallucinations, hypnosis, and the aberrant behaviors produced by drugs. More progress has been made in understanding some of these in the last twenty years than in all previous history. In the case of sleep, for example, Nathaniel Kleitman and his followers have now shown that sleep comes in cycles, with brief periods of light sleep, rapid eye movement (REM), and dreaming, every hour or two. Their studies show that, contrary to popular belief, time is not speeded up in dreams, and that most dreams are forgotten except for the one going on at the time of awakening. The REM sleep seems to give a special kind of rest, for if subjects are awakened at the beginning of each REM period so that they do not get any REM sleep, they develop strange behavior and daytime hallucinations which they do not show if awakened for the same length of time during periods of deep sleep. All this is the more peculiar in that there is no known cellular reason why sleep is necessary at all. The heart does not sleep, and many lower animals do not seem to sleep in our sense. However, many animals have twenty-four-hour activity cycles even in steady light or steady darkness, as though they had internal "biological clocks," and these cycles are now being intensively studied. Students of sleep are particularly excited by the recent discovery by John Pappenheimer and his co-workers that when a goat or other animal has been kept awake for several days, his spinal fluid begins to contain some substance that will put cats and mice to sleep. This appears to be a small molecule, and the sleep induced by it appears to be more natural than that induced by sleeping pills. Its chemistry and its site of production in the brain and its mode of action will be an intensely interesting question.
Split-brain
studies— A
series
of
patients
suffering
violent
epileptic
by medicine have been treated by radical surgery —cutting the corpus callosum and other fiber bundles or commissures that cross-connect the right and left hemispheres of the upper brain. This would, in theory, prevent electrical "reverberation" between the halves. Seizures have been markedly reduced in frequency and severity, even attacks not controlled
completely eliminated in the better cases. Sperry and associates have shown that such patients act as though
144
John R. Piatt they had two half-brains, the right visual
field, left nostril,
left
serving the right side of the body,
right ear,
and
all
speech and writing; the
right half serving corresponding functions on the opposite side, plus spatial perceptions. Such patients respond normally to things seen in
the right half of the visual field but say they left half.
They
can, however, pick selectively
do not see stimuli in the by hand (the left hand,
not the right) the items they just said they could not see. In general lack of conscious connection seems to prevail between the two halves of the brain for most higher functions. But there
is
still
some interchange
emotion at the basic level, apparently through the lower brain stem which still connects the two halves. The psychology of these patients may show us remarkable things about the organization of the nervous system which could have been learned in no other way, and perhaps someday this will permit cures of epilepsy by less drastic means. of
Genetic diseases— It
is
now
well estabUshed that a
number
of mental
and diseases are caused by genetic and chromosomal aberrations. These include mongolism and phenylketonuria (PKU), which leads to a form of idiocy that can now be prevented by giving a baby a special diet. Schizophrenia, which fills over half the beds in mental hospitals in the United States, also seems to have a genetic component, because when one of a pair of identical twins has it, in more than half the cases the defects
other twin has
it
also.
Memory.— M^ny workers have been studying the molecular basis of memory formation. It appears that there is a short-term memory, which may represent some electrical or chemical polarization between nerve cells that have recently been active, and a long-term memory, which may represent the formation of new permanent synapses between these cells, perhaps guided by these
initial
short-term polarizations. Louis Flexner
and Bernard Agranoff and others have shown that several drugs which prevent protein synthesis in the cells will also prevent the conversion of short-term memory into long-term memory, so that under the influence of these drugs, rats or goldfish will forget within a short time whatever they have just learned. Possibly the protein synthesis is needed for the manufacture of the permanent synaptic bridges. The proteins that are formed may still be quite specific to the individual cells, and many workers have come to the view that almost every cell in the nervous system may have its own biochemical code. The experiments mentioned earlier, on the nervous connections of an extra eye or limb, seem to suggest that only nerve cells that are properly coded toward each other can be connected up. Specific chemical control messengers are evidently sent between specific nerve cells just as they are between other tissues. Roger Sperry, Jerome Lettvin, and others have
and
his co-workers,
145
The
Biological Sciences
demonstrated that the optie nerve ean be eut eye can even be rotated surgically, but that
newt
in a
when
or frog,
and the
the optic nerve then
and the neural connections grow back to the brain, they in the retina and brain as before. There is evidently a pre-programmed set of cell-to-cell relationships in the brain, which guide any new relationships that can be learned. James Olds and others have also shown that there are tiny "pain centers" and "pleasure centers" in the region of the hypothalamus of the brain, as well as "fight centers," "maternal centers," and many other behaviorregenerates,
connect the same points
specific or emotion-specific areas. Rats
with an electrode implanted in it over and over
the pleasure center will press the button that stimulates
again for thousands of times an hour without paying attention to any other stimulation.
responses
to
Some
traces
of
of these sites are chemically specific in their
maternal hormones,
sex
hormones,
or
other
chemicals.
One
of the
century
is
most important discoveries
in
psychology in the twentieth
"operant conditioning." This remarkable and powerful be-
method is linked with the name beyond the older associative conditioning havioral
and goes far showed that with food, would
of B. F. Skinner
of Pavlov. Pavlov
a dog, having learned to associate the sound of a bell
eventually salivate at the sound of the bell alone. Skinner showed, on the other hand, that an animal could learn to do
master a very complex
much more and
could
he were given an immediate reward or "reinforcement" for every small step along the way. A pigeon or a dog, for example, might be given a morsel of food, or even just a "secondary reinforcer," such as a clicking sound that has been associated with food, every time he comes closer to performing a given task. In this way a dog can be quickly taught to open a cupboard door, and a pigeon can be taught to stand on tiptoes or to play table tennis. It is called "operant conditioning" because the animal himself does the operating which the experimenter reinforces. With the instant reward or feedback, he can sometimes learn in a few minutes what took days or weeks of trial-anderror learning by the older teaching methods. Skinner suggests that for a baby the primary reinforcement is the mother s milk and comfort, and the secondary reinforcers are the attention of the eyes, the expression, and tone of voice. These reinforcers, repeated by the rest of the family and friends, are powerful feedbacks that shape our behavior for the rest of our lives. It is noteworthy that Skinner finds that punishment— or "aversive reinforcement"— always damages the rate of learning of a task. Simply turning off
task, if
the reinforcement after a
wrong response
is
far
more
effective in
quickly eliciting the right response than any shock or physical blow.
We
suddenly realize that punishment has been used throughout history, not because it speeds up the child's learning, but because it is a simple
146
John R. Plan quick response which
The power
is
"reinforcing" for the teacher.
method
comes from three things: and the use of random or probabilistic reinforcement. After a few rewards have been given, and a task has been learned, an animal will go on repeating the same behavior even when the reinforcements are given only occasionally. The behavior may become even "stronger" and more compulsive if the reinforcement is given at random, say one time in five or ten or fifty, as in the payoff from its
speed,
its
of the Skinner
of teaching
transfer to secondary reinforcers,
a slot machine. This gives us for the
first
time an explanation of the addic-
which has been very hard to explain in terms of psychological motivations and biological needs.
tive character of gambling,
of the traditional
list
With random reinforcement, birds
or rats will press a bar thousands of
times an hour for the occasional reward and will go on for hours, like
Las Vegas gamblers, even when the effort costs them far more than they get back. These fast responses are now being used by psychologists to obtain data on animal perception and discrimination far more rapidly and accurately than has ever been possible before.
Teaching and learning— Operstnt conditioning Skinner "teaching machines" or what
is
called
is
also the basis of the
more generally
"pro-
machines or the new "teaching books," the material to be learned is broken into small successive bits, and these bits are set down in sequence on a lesson sheet or on the page of the book. The student puts his answer or an "x" in a space and then uncovers a comparison answer to get an immediate feedback as to whether he is right, before going on to the next question. The success of the method depends critically on the skillful design of the program, but a spelling lesson or a physics lesson may be broken into twenty or thirty points, and a student may master these, with several repetitions, in less
grammed
instruction." In the teaching
time than it takes to get across the same points in a lecture. This permits each student to progress at his own rate, and it saves enormously on teacher time.
More complex versions of this kind of instruction are now being programmed into computers. The sequence of instruction materials or questions
is
presented on the face of a picture tube, and the student can reply
by typing out answers
or questions on an electric typewriter or
by using a answers on the face of the tube, again with instant reinforcement for correct answers. There is special emphasis on flexible '^branching programs," where the kind of answer a student makes de"light
pen"
to point to
It now appears that complete courses such as college algebra can be programmed in this way, so that the classroom teacher may be able to get away from elementary or repetitious material and spend more time on the larger aspects of the
termines whether the next step will be easy or hard.
subject.
147
The
Biological Sciences
methods are used by a human parent nod of approval, as teachers always have, or reinforcing more formally by awarding "points" to the pupils at random when they are behaving or answering properly. These points may be translated later into more tangible rewards such as privileges or food, just as they always have been in families giving love and approval to their children's behavior. It is said that these formal reinforcement methods are much more effective than traditional teacher behavior in generating an enthusiasm for learning, even with "problem
Of
course, similar reinforcement
or teacher, reinforcing with the eyes or a
children."
becoming
It is
clear that
programmed
instruction of various kinds
may
an impact on mass education and self-education as the invention of printed books had five hundred years ago. It may be the only way in which we can transmit our complex high-technology culture
have
to the
as great
hundreds of millions of children around the world who need
it
not
only for personal development but also for the development of their nations.
Studies of "early enrichment" are making another kind of revolution in
education. is
It
has
now been proved
that rich sensory experience in infancy
necessary for the development of the higher nervous system. Depriva-
companionship leads to bizarre adult behavior, and David Krech and others have shown that animals kept in a deprived or dull environment have poor problem-solving abilities, while animals from the same litter kept in an enriched environment grow up with much more tion of
intelligence.
This has led to a massive reexamination of our assumptions about the
development of intelligence in human children. It now appears that between ages one and four can raise a child's intelligence quotient, or I.Q., by about ten points, and enrichment between the ages of four and sixteen can raise it by another ten points. The low I.Q.'s of slum children, which are often near 80 instead of the normal 100, may result not from their genetics, as is often supposed, but from their cultural poverty, and may be raised to the normal level by early tutoring programs such as Operation Head Start. Still worse difficulties may be produced by the actual anti-educational attitudes of parents in many cultures and subcultures. It is found that they may often suppress imaginative play, for example, because it is
cultural enrichment
"may lead to telling lies." Since imagination is the basis for and for symbolizing one object by another, children from such cultures may have serious difficulties when they get into school in reading and in learning what letters and words mean. Fortunately it is known that a few minutes a day is enough to get a young child started on imaginative play and symbolization. Thus a change in parental atti"unreal" or abstraction
tudes could greatly affect education in the next generation.
148
John R. Piatt Other innovations
in
curriculum and teaching methods from kinder-
garten through high school, in science, mathematics, and
many
other
making a new educational revolution in the United States today. Education is becoming more concrete, more personal, and more interesting at all levels, and the difference can already be seen in the brilliance and enthusiasm of the students. It is not certain what the genetic limits are on human intelligence and problem-solving abilities, but it now appears that we have never been educating children anywhere close to them. With these new educational ideas and methods, the average child may be able to reach intellectual achievements far beyond what we had ever dreamed. The extension of these improvements to all schools and all countries will make an enormous difference in the quality subjects, are
of life in the
world
decades ahead.
in the
HIGHER HUMAN PROCESSES Pattern
perception.— Three other areas of vigorous study today are
lin-
and language translation, general problem-solving, and pattern perception. The attempt to simulate these processes with guistic processes
electronic computers in the
same way
much about how
is
now
teaching us
much about how
the brain works,
cameras— artificial eyes— taught us
that the study of
the eye works.
In the pattern perception problem, for example, computers have been
programmed by Frank Rosenblatt and others so as to recognize pattern elements in an array of inputs, and to recognize various letters of the alphabet by their corners and line elements, even when the letters are written in different ways. to occur in the
first
A
similar abstraction of pattern elements seems
stages of the brain, since
David Hubel and Torsten
Wiesel have shown that the visual cortex of the cat has
cells that distin-
guish the direction of line segments in the field of view. In the brain of
and
the frog, Jerome Lettvin
his co-workers likewise
found
cells
that
could distinguish different curved and moving edges.
The discovery field is first
that self-motion
is
necessary for organizing the visual
one of the most significant findings of the
discovered in the 1950's, by R.
W.
last
few
years. It
was
Ditchburn, Lorrin Riggs, and
that human vision requires a continual fine tremor motion of the eyeballs, although this is too small and fast to be seen by the naked eye. Richard Held and his co-workers then showed more generally that their co-workers,
"reafferent stimulation," that field is
produced by self-motion,
to learn
birth
is
how
to see.
A
is,
is
stimulation from changes in the visual
absolutely necessary
light, will
a growing animal
few months
after
its life. That is, the kitten, when walk unconcernedly over a "visual cliff"— such
essentially blind for the rest of
brought into the
if
kitten kept in the dark for a
149
The
Biological Sciences
as a horizontal sheet of glass extending over the
a normal kitten of the
same age
will "freeze" or
edge of a table— whereas
draw back. But
kind of blindness also characterizes a kitten kept in diffuse
this
same
one watch a steady field through a hole several times a day, or even one that is carried around in a cart through a varied environ-
that
light, or
allovv^ed to
is
ment every day, as long as it is not allowed to move itself while in the light. Only the kitten that pulls the cart has normal visual responses!— because it can organize its visual field by relating the changes in the field to
its
own
self-motion.
A
particularly convincing demonstration
is
to
have a kitten ride in the cart with its right eye blindfolded and then pull the cart with its left eye blindfolded, being kept in the dark at all other times. Such a kitten is then able to see the visual cliff with its right eye but not with its left eye. A similar requirement of self-motion for adaptation is found with college students who put on distorting glasses that bend or twist the line of sight. The students do not learn to correct for the distortion if they are wheeled around in a wheelchair, but they can learn to correct for it in a few minutes if they wheel themselves around. Functional Geometry —The organization of perception by self-motion and reafferent stimulation helps us solve an old puzzle. How can we
when lines are straight, or we do, when the array of cells tell
rangement of the another?
cells
We now
the retina
is
and
parallel, or equidistant, as accurately as
in
our retinas
differs, in
their detailed positions,
see that a possible answer
lies in
the genetic ar-
from one person
to
when can be moved eye can make
the fact that
organizing the world, straight or parallel lines
along their length by self-motion of the eyeball, or the
jumps between the equidistant lines so as to superimpose their the images are invariant under such displacements, the patterns must be accurately regular. Circular arcs and other basic patterns can also be identified by such invariance tests. These are not static tests but dynamic tests, and with them it no longer matters where the individual retinal cells are located or whether the cells are in the same place in two discrete
images.
If
different retinas.
The organization
of the field
by
this
kind of "functional geometry"
is
in
sharp contrast to the traditional methods of Euclidean and Cartesian
geometry since it is concerned with properties of a whole figure at once and not just with the motion or locus of a point. Also, it does not require previously defined elements such as measures of length or "shortest distance" or "center of a circle," as in Euclidean geometry, or the rightangle coordinate axes and measures of distance that are needed in Cartesian geometry. It
is
particularly well suited to the variable systems of
biology because the test of "invariance"
is
independent not only of the
location or sensitivity of individual cells but also of any distortions of
150
John R. Piatt if one end of a straight Hne makes no difference to the invariance test continues to fall on the same distorted image
the image on the retina— or on the cortex. For falls
on a distorted image,
this
as long as the rest of the line
when
the eyeball scans along
tected
by
this
it.
Geometrical regularities that are de-
method are therefore not
ternal field but in an external field.
necessarily regularities in an in-
That
is,
they are regularities in a
"public" field of patterns which transcend the detailed anatomical differences between one eye or brain and another. How else than by such a method could we have developed public agreement on objects and public definitions of words and a precise public language for communication between persons? Self-reinforcing feedback
loops— Such an organization
self-motion and reafferent stimulation
is,
of the field
in fact, a special
by
kind of feed-
back loop for directing the motions or judgments of the organism. It is a feedback loop that does not depend simply on static error-signals but on error-signals that are tested, so to speak, by making a response to them. Feedback-loop characterizations of the perceptual process in general have begun to be emphasized by Donald Mackay and recently by Peter Putnam and Robert Fuller. Thus one particular pattern of input signals reaching our eyes will lead to one motor output or response, as for example the sight of a red skirt
may
lead to following a
as the sight of a red
girl;
apple
while a different pattern leads to another,
may
lead to salivation and eating. There are
evidently numerous "reflex arcs" and feedback loops within the brain which combine these patterns of signals in the right way and produce coordinated motor outputs. These are further combined in higher order loops so as to give smoother, more delayed, and more complex control, and it may be that with experience still higher order loops are continually
being formed.
But the point
is
that the loops are not all internal.
The muscle motions
modify the input signals in ways and organizing the visual we have seen. Then a larger loop is formed between the organism
that "reach out" into the external world
that are necessary for verifying, correcting, field, as
and the external world.
The new complexity for special
in the feedback-loop model is made by the need emphasis on self-reinforcing loops. These are loops where
certain outputs or responses of the system continue to generate the
input over and over.
The pathway
same
of the signals through the system be-
comes a multiply reinforced pathway, like the ruts in a country road that keep channeling succeeding cars into the same grooves, making them deeper and deeper. This kind of self-reinforcing loop may be represented by the baby tracing the edge of a block over and over with his finger, or by the 151
The
Biological Sciences
keep the input invariant. Possibly the whole set of balancing actions of the body that keep the head upright and pointed in a certain direction represent a complex set of multiple-channel self-reinforcing loops of this kind, coordinated through a single "switchboard" or center in the nervous system. The reaching out of these loops into the environment means that awareness requires action— just as we have always known that directed action requires awareness. This throws new light on the "transactional" view of perception, which has been held by many psychologists. As Martin Buber has said, we should not speak of objects in the field as "its," but as "I-its," with the self an essential part of the perceived objects. The world which is interacted with is just the other side of the feedback loop, a kind of extension of the organism. "The world becomes a realized double of the man," as Emerson said. The organism, however, is blind to many of the elements of its own operations. We cannot see our own eyeballs, or the continual tremor motions that make vision possible, or the states of the neurons in the brain that mediate our judgment. The "self also is not present to perception except as a voluntary component in the interaction with every object. This picture of the perceptual process gives a world view sharply different from the world view of physics, which is based on the "pointlocus" models of Euclidean and Cartesian geometry. A parallel-processing decision-system does not act at a point in space but over a region, as the output signals go to the many muscles that move the hand and the tool, or speak and fill the room. Where is the point of action? Likewise, such a system does not act at a sharp instant of time, but "at a given time" eye tracing a straight line so as
it
involves
to
and outputs distributed over large fractions of a memory storage and genetic structhe neural chemistry that goes back in time for minutes to
inputs
second, as well as reafferent loops and tural storage in
millions of years. All this time
is
"now," but
when
is
the instant of time?
This kind of perceptual system also differs from the usual physical
probably contains no "maps" of the read them?— A little "homunculus," another little perceptual system inside? That only postpones the problem. A mountain is surely not represented in the nervous system by a little mountain, nor the interior of a house by a little house with all its parts. Instead, it seems likely that our internal representation of the world is in
picture of the world in that external world. If
it
did,
it
who would
terms of abstracted pattern elements and action loops.
What more
direct
representation than a representation by motor outputs?
Objective and subjective. —Such a model of the brain throws a light
new
on the difference between the "objective" and the "subjective" way
of looking at the world.
we drop
a ball
The
objective
and then watch how
way
it
152
is
the
moves; or
way in
of science, in
which
which we "prepare a
John R. state," as the physicists say,
see
what
will
happen.
affecting the system a
The way
the system
We
and then, without intruding
is
further, wait to
can never entirely prevent our interaction
from
we try to make it a "weak interaction." behaves when we leave it alone in this way gives little bit,
but
us the laws of physics, chemistry, in this fashion
Piatt
and biology. The world-view
the objective world of science, the world of
built
weak
up
inter-
mechanism, and general determinism. is the world which performs and interprets these experiments. It is the cybernetic world, the world of our knowledge and values and goal-directed behavior. It is the world of "strong interaction," in which we choose to interact or not to interact with the system; to do the experiment and set it up in a certain way, or not to do it; to drive the car to Chicago, or not to drive it. Even in a purely abstract field like mathematics, there has recently been an increasing recognition of this personal element and of the fact that it is we who choose the theorems and who must be convinced by the proof. It will be hard to make a complete objective study of any living human brain. It is private in the way it receives and amplifies subtle input signals not accessible to another observer, and in the way it makes subtle discriminations based on a life history of unique personal structure and experience, as George Wald has emphasized. The brain is also complex— orders of magnitude more complex than the human eye, which is only a small part of it. So that although the 10^ cells of the eye are enough for doing physics— for watching the motions of planets or the reactions in a test tube, which are low-information problems— it would take the eyes of everyone in the world to observe all the 10^^ neurons in a single brain at a given instant, even if each person were assigned to watch thirty neurons at a time. The brain is also outside our complete determinist system of prediction for a more profound reason. This has been emphasized by Donald Mackay, and it has to do with the peculiar logical and causal status of the "self-knowledge" which characterizes any decision-system that belongs to our universe of interpersonal communication. Predict to a ball that it will fall, and it makes no difference to its falling; but predict to a man that he will fall, and he may take extra precautions to stay upright, or he may fall more absurdly to show it is true. Self-predictions of our
and
action
The
of causality,
subjective world, on the other hand,
conscious choices are not real predictions in the noninterfering sense like predicting rain— which
By
terminism.
is
the only sense in which
system are not real predictions
With
full
we can
speak of de-
the same token, predictions of the behavior of a decisionif
they are communicated to the system.
interpersonal communication, a decision-system ceases to be
an "object" and becomes a "co-subject," with
all
directed freedom of choice that that implies. "I-thou," as
Buber would
say.
153
the subjective and goal-
It is
not a "thou" but an
The It is
Biological Sciences
means
interesting to see that this
that our
whole society
is
in
principle unpredictable as a deterministic object, except perhaps statis-
because interpersonal communication is precisely the basis on which a society is constructed. Society is capable of changing to a new course at any time because of some objectively unforeseeable individual act of insight or decision within a single brain— some act of leadership or violence or invention— that carries the whole society along with it. This conclusion goes considerably beyond the concept of cybernetics, as developed by Norbert Wiener; that is, the concept of feedback which
tically,
can guide goal-directed behavior in animate or inanimate systems. Cybernetics has been one of the great seminal ideas of the mid-twentieth century. It is the basic principle of teleological behavior, or action with "purpose," and therefore it is one of the important ways in which biology goes far beyond physics and chemistry. Goal-directed feedback is our
way
of understanding the biological
stabilization responses,
more important phenomenon Szent-Gyorgyi has put Life
is
phenomenon
of '"homeostasis," or
which Walter Cannon emphasized,
as well as the
of internally directed growth.
As Albert
it,
not like physical things ...
If
you use your car a lot, the if you walk a lot, your legs out by work; but the living
car wears out and your legs get weak, but get strong. builds
The
itself
non-living wears
itself
up.
Such ideas make Aristotle's discussion of purpose in natural systems seem much more scientific and less objectionable than they seemed to the nineteenth-century determinists
But what we
^ .
are seeing here
that these cybernetic ideas can
is
now
be extended, as we conceive of the brain not as a simple feedback loop or directed growth pattern but as a "parallel-processing decision-system stabilized with self-reinforcing feedback loops," with properties that go beyond any simple feedback or computer statement of the problem. This larger picture of the mechanisms of perceptual and mental organization has profound implications for our scientific and philosophical understanding not only of the brain but of the relation of an intelligent choosing organism to the environment and the society with which it interacts.
*'lock-ins" and social structure
These ideas of systems and of self-reinforcing loops can also be applied in a fruitful
way
to society itself
actions of cooperation
and
conflict.
systems and feedback approach
1
is
and
A
to the
problems of human
shown
in
the economic theories of
For locating these discussions, see the Syntopicon under Nature
154
inter-
fairly successful application of a
3c(3).
John R. Piatt John Maynard Keynes, which are
now used
to stabiHze national
economic
growth.
becoming possible now to analyze certain self-reinforcing "lock-in situations" which represent the most dangerous situations in the world today. Lock-ins occur in any ongoing flow system, where the flow itself sets up forces that maintain the existing patterns and keep them from being easily changed. A mechanical example is that of a stick wedged against a rock in a waterfall, which may be held in one position by the force of the water so as to deflect the waterfall to one side and affect its course far down the river, unless the stick can be lifted and moved to another position. The ruts in a country
With the newer
ideas,
it
is
also
road represent a historical lock-in of successive vehicles into the original track.
In fact, it could be said that all that we mean by "permanence" in a dynamic ongoing world is a self-reinforcing loop or lock-in of some kind a given level of organization— a reconciliation of Heraclitus with Democritus, of the world of flow with the world of objects. An atom, for
at
example,
is
made
enzyme molecules
of self-reinforcing "standing waves" of electrons.
self-maintaining system. that work,
and
this
The
that persist for eons are those that contribute to a
The wings
of birds or bats are locked in to shapes
kind of self-reinforcement happens whenever
we have
convergent evolution.
These ideas can be generalized to the case of "multiple lock-ins," in which a set of different "solutions" interact and stabilize each other. A good example is the case of vowel sounds, where the choice of a given vowel sound in a given dialect affects neighboring vowel sounds, almost as though there were a physical repulsion between them. So Americans have the one-syllable words "bee" and "bay" but not "beh"; "he" and "hay" but not "heh"; "see" and "say" but not "seh"; and so on. The child who uses the intermediate sound is corrected, and laughed at, and finally may not get what he wants. These vowel sounds are locked in to each other, so that they may all shift together as we go from one dialect to another or spoken language changes over the years. One can see similar mutual stabilization among the animals in an ecological system, as the lion's characteristics, for example, are locked in to the speed of the antelope and the toughness of the water buffalo. as the
relationships of
In social systems, the choice of a left-hand or a right-hand rule for
on two-way streets represents a lock-in which is initially arbitrary but which is self-maintaining and has to be universal if accidents are traffic
be avoided. A more subtle example is that of multiple psychological between the members of a family, with their roles and relations remaining almost unchanged for years until someone leaves or dies or a new wife is brought in. Great industrial organizations may become locked in on the manufacture of cars or the manufacture of weapons, while to
lock-ins
155
The
Biological Sciences
other public needs, of equal importance and possibly equal profit in the
long run, go begging for a solution. In national policy, there
may be
multiple lock-ins between the presi-
dency, the Congress, the opposition party, the newspapers, the militaryindustrial complex, the voters,
As a
ning for the in
and the
result, the options available to a office
number
by
may be
policies of foreign governments.
President or to a congressman run-
very narrow, because any change would change
of his sympathizers or opponents,
many
of
whom
are locked
local forces in their turn.
What mechanisms
change may be available when these lock-ins human purposes? The problem is difficult but it is not entirely hopeless. One possible mechanism is a change of ideas and standards leading to a drift of the whole system, which is perhaps what brought the civil rights movement to success after World War II. Another is the sudden introduction of new technological devices, as in the case of the long-playing record, which changed the diversity of home music; or the computer, which is changing banking; or nuclear weapons, which have changed the face of war. Another mechanism is the steady changes of technological scale which alter the "space" of the lock-ins or the ecosystem. For example, modern technology and communications have altered the space within which nations move and the speed and complexity of their choices, forcing government by hereditary kings of doubtful ability to be replaced by government by committees of
become
of
destructive of larger
managers.
The
lock-ins of habit, custom,
the performance of
many
and poor organizational design poison
of our smaller organizations, such as small
and cities. As a result, our lives and our work are harder and less pleasant than they could be with the same resources but with a more responsive organizational structure and better handling of new information and change. Technical solutions and rules for restructuring the lock-in problems at this level might give improved payoffs for everyone involved, and might do more than almost businesses, schools, public organizations,
anything else to release the creative social energies of our people.
we
are able to see the reaction which needs to be and we see that the energy change is favorable, but there is an organizational barrier. The problem is to invent a "social enzyme" that will get around it or that will dissolve and restructure these self-maintaining lock-ins. Perhaps with practice and with a body of
In
all
these cases,
catalyzed, so to speak,
decision-rules for social cooperation, this process it is
may become
easier than
today.
and the problem of the "Prisoners Dilemma."— "Frisoner's Dilemma" is a "game" which simulates a particularly dangerous lock-in conflict situation between competing human beings, and which is now Conflict
156
John R. Piatt being extensively analyzed for the light it may throw on larger social problems. This game simulates the situation of two prisoners suspected
by the police who are kept apart and interrogated and urged each other. If both cooperate (with each other) and refuse to
on both
to tell talk,
may
get off lightly in the absence of other evidence. If both "defect" and on each other, both are punished. But if only one "defects," he gets a reward, while the one who has continued to cooperate "gets the book thrown at him," with a much more severe sentence. Under these circumstances, what is the "rational" choice for each man to make? It is clearly to each man's immediate advantage to defect, no matter what the other man does— which is why the police set up such a reward system. Yet if they both defect, they are both worse off than if both had tacitly cooperated with each other by keeping silent. We see that in this case there is a "collective rationality" which differs from "individual rationality" but which would nevertheless have higher payoflFs for both individuals. This is not a "zero-sum game" like chess or poker, where one player wins what another loses, but is a "non-zero-sum game" where both players may win or lose together. Anatol Rapoport and his co-workers have had hundreds of pairs of students play this kind of game over and over again in order to see what the actual behavior of human beings is like in such a dilemma. The players are not allowed to communicate with each other (except through the consequences of their plays), and they receive small monetary rewards or losses which simulate the "rewards" to the prisoners. On repeated plays, the behavior of each pair of students tends to lock in, with both tending to defect on each other all the time, or both tending to cooperate. Another non-zero-sum game is the game of "Chicken," like the "game" played by teen-agers who drive cars toward each other at high speed down the middle of the road. If one driver "cooperates" by swerving aside, both are saved, but the cooperator loses in prestige because he is "chicken"; if neither swerves, both lose heavily. These and many other non-zero-sum games which exhibit other dilemmas of individual versus collective rationality are now being simulated in the laboratory. Each type of game is found to call forth its own type of threat or sacrifice, of tell
leadership, conflict, or cooperation in the players.
The importance and
may
games is that they show on a small scale measurable way the kind of social behavior that
of these
in a quantitatively
occur between neighbors in a lawsuit or between nations using
nuclear threats and "brinkmanship" against each other. Kenneth Boulding
has said, "Prisoner's
Dilemma
is
the fruit-fly of social interaction,"
ing that such laboratory gaming
mechanisms of
social conflict
may
teach us as
and cooperation
mean-
much about
as fruit fly studies
the
have
taught us about genetics in recent years. In fact, these studies already suggest several important insights into
157
The
Biological Sciences
the problems of international conflict, which are our most dangerous
world problems today. For one thing, we see that the problems of life and death and the large problems of the world are all non-zero-sum problems. In biology,
all
the organs of the
we
sick together. In economics,
all
body
are healthy together or
prosper together or suffer depression
together. In international nuclear politics,
we
either live a better
life
mankind is some kind of zero-sum poker game where one nation simply wins what the other nation loses. And the famiHar strategy of individual rationality and of secrecy and bluffing and defection, which works so well around the poker table, may be disastrous in this different kind of game. Second, it helps to see that in such games there is a real dilemma between the strategy that is individually rational in the short run and together or die together.
It is
not true that the
the strategy that will obtain larger payoffs to
game keeps going
makes
on. This
it
less
life
all
of
individuals
when
the
puzzling that there should be
such violent differences on national courses of action between intelligent men who are each trying to do the best thing for the country. It is
communication between the conflicting parties or nations is of great value in making sure of reaching a strategy profitable to both. The locking in of cooperation (or defection) in these dilemmagames also suggests that a series of small steps on which the parties can
clear that in such cases
cooperate
initially
may
behavior on large steps Third, behavior.
we
see
greatly increase the probability of cooperative later.
the value
of
internalized
Whenever communication
moral rules
or prediction
is
in
dilemma-
imperfect,
it
in-
creases the average payoffs the players tend to have some general moral rules or "heuristic rules" suggesting that short-run individual rationality may be very costly to everybody in the long run. The thief keeps the faith with the thieves is a survival principle for bands of thieves. Such rules help lock in on the cooperative solution. Moral rules are like rules of speaking in order at a meeting or driving a car on the right-hand side, suggesting social behavior patterns that give us collective benefits in general without having to think each time about what to do. What is most important about Prisoner's Dilemma, however, is that it sharpens up our understanding of our world danger today by showing that the origin of our danger now is not "primordial evil" or our "unreconstructed lower brain" or some "flaw" in the nature or behavior of man but is rather a lock-in conflict-dilemma between independent social systems. Some recent writers have emphasized the aggressive biological background of mankind, as though this were the whole origin of our problems; and they have spoken of "the Territorial Imperative" of animals and tribes to stake out their own territories and defend them. But if this were the basic trouble with the world, there would be no countries or groups of countries with internal peace and security, such as the if all
158
a
John R. Piatt Scandinavian countries have, and no countries with undefended borders, such as the U.S. -Canadian border.
No: these defects and hostile drives of individual men are real, but they can be minimized with good educational and social systems and with enough to eat, and they are simply not very relevant to the crisis problems of the world today which are social-structural rather than animalistic. Discussion of such drives may even make the international problems worse by suggesting to many people that these problems are inescapably built into the nature of man and that hence nothing can be done about them. The lethal dangers in the world today are not due to these flaws in individual man but to the fact that independent social systems with nuclear weapons are forced to live together in a shrinking world— "like scorpions in a bottle," as Robert Oppenheimer said— with
independent internal dynamics and with hostile and self-aggravating lock-ins that are not coordinated for their real mutual interests.
Make
a
more
unified decision-network for this organism,
mankind—
network that will have practical ways of settling differences and of keeping the peace between the parts— and our fears of the total annihilation of biological
man
will decrease sharply, regardless of all our sub-
conscious aggressions and our territorial imperatives.
by
culture;
and a culture adequately structured
Man
is
now
created
for intercontrol, inter-
growth, and intereducation will produce security, prosperity, well-being,
and much more peaceful men. Can it be done? Almost certainly. But it is we have enough dedicated men with the vision and skill to lead us to do it within the shrinking time that remains.
not certain whether
DEVELOPMENTS AHEAD
Herman
Kahn and his co-workers and Daniel Bell and his colleagues have recently suggested lists of new technical developments that they predict will be made by the year 2000. Most of their items are items from physics and engineering, such as fusion power, the control of weather, and artificial hearts. But it is possible to add to their lists several important developments in biological technology that lie close ahead. Genetic copying of animals —As an adult organism seems to contain
we have in
its
seen, each of the cells of
nucleus and chromosomes the
information necessary for the development of the whole organism. Michael Fischberg and J. B. Gurdon, using a micropipette, have taken a single cell nucleus from a cell of a developed tadpole and have reim-
full
planted
this
nucleus into a fertilized frog egg in place of the egg's
own
They have shown that in a good percentage of the cases this egg will then grow into a fully fertile adult frog which is a genetic duplicate of the animal from which the nucleus was taken.
nucleus.
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The
Biological Sciences
method could be extended to higher animals such as chickens, and cattle, it would give rise to a billion-dollar business. It would make possible the copying of the best animals in each flock or herd, which could give rise to a whole herd of "instant champions" in a single breeding season. This could increase meat, milk, and egg production in many countries by 50 to 100 percent. Plants and some of the lower animals can propagate copies from pieces of themselves, but copying has not been done with vertebrates before, so in a sense this is the most revolutionary development in evolution in the last half-billion years. If this method can be extended to higher animals, the change in our level of control over our biological environment and the implications for human biology in the long run could be very great. If this
hogs,
Contraceptives in foods.— There are stories that various primitive tribes
may have
eaten certain plants with contraceptive properties. The development and use of contraceptives in foods was advocated by Homi Bhabha, late chief of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission. This would greatly simplify the practice of contraception. In fact, many an American community today might gladly vote to replace their daily pills, intrauterine coils, and other devices by such a convenient method, if it were available and were known to be safe and effective. To adopt such a system would require, of course, a democratic decision by a nation as to whether it should be adopted, and it would require that there be "other stores" where a couple could go to buy untreated food if they really wanted to have children. But this would mean that every child was a wanted child— not necessarily a bad or immoral thing at all for the children of the world!
To be in
effective, the contraceptive substances
widely used processed foodstuffs, such as
would have
salt,
to
be put
sugar, bread, rice, or
same way that we now put and Vitamin D in milk. Finding a contraceptive that can be taken by all ages and sexes without undesirable side effects might be difficult, but it is not necessarily impossible, considering how many different types of contraceptive substances we know. The important thing about this approach of Bhabha's is that it could result in the beginning of a leveling off of population in the most desperate countries perhaps ten to twenty years sooner— hundreds of millions of babies sooner— than present contraceptive methods requiring beer, as a public health measure, in the
chlorine in water, iodine in
individual medical help. This
salt,
is
because the biochemical development,
and implementation might require only a few years, if the history of the development of oral contraceptives is any guide; while the problem of reaching hundreds of millions of individuals with present methods would require many years of work by hundreds of thousands of paramedical personnel who have to be trained in training centers that testing,
160
John R. Piatt will take
The
many more
years to set
up and
to staff.
kind of positive contraceptive method, with its provision for individual choice— for "wanted" children— would therefore be payoflF of this
enormous,
know
terms of
in
human hope and
health and happiness. Just to
is within sight would hope and confidence and could open up many
that a leveling off of the population explosion
give us
all
a
new
new economic
level of
resources in planning for the future.
Regeneration of organs.— li all the information necessary for the development of a whole organism is present in every adult cell, it should be possible to regenerate a cutoff finger or hand, instead of just being able to grow a little skin over the stump. Lobsters can regenerate claws, and newts can regenerate whole eyes and optic nerves, as we have mentioned. Why not man? Maybe it would take some application of salt solutions, embryonic fluids, tissue inducers extracted from lower animals, or some kind of neural or electrical excitation, since we know that innervation is necessary for muscle growth. But there are many ways to try, and if something like this could be done, many might prefer growing a new finger or hand, even slowly, rather than having to have a clumsy mechanical prosthesis. It is said that less than a dozen biologists are working in this field today. If a few dozen more would volunteer or could be assigned to work on this problem— as they are assigned in military medicine to work on prosthetic devices— the payoff for amputees and persons disfigured in accidents could conceivably be very high.
New
channels of personal communication— As
we have
seen, speech,
words, and language were one of the prehistoric inventions that
made men
men. But speech comes through a single channel— the throat. Considering the multiple-channel character of the brain, and how much we are beginning to know about parallel processing, communication and information theory, and linguistics, the question arises whether today we might go beyond this primitive invention of speech and find or create a group of additional parallel channels of person-to-person communication. Facial expressions and tone of voice give us some parallel channels, but these channels, while important, are few and not very specific. One place where additional parallel channels might be acquired is in the fingers. One can imagine a rubber glove fitted, say to the left hand of a small child, with the child taught to manipulate his muscles hke a pianist or violinist, so that several electrical contacts in the glove could
pick up his muscle signals in a precise way.
with opposed pairs of muscles, and
whose
this
The hand has nineteen bones would give at least nineteen
be broadcast from a lowpower radio on the child's wrist. A teacher or another child with a similar radio and glove might pick up these signals and have them transformed
parallel channels,
signals could then
161
The back into
electrical pulses
Biological Sciences
going
touching the back of the hand
With such
to, say,
in a
nineteen other small electrodes
one-to-one correspondence.
a system, one particular flexing of the fingers might convey
a graph, another a sketched cartoon,
and another might transmit a whole
sentence or an explicit pattern of ideas in a single gesture. Speeches that
now
take an hour might take minutes! Obviously, such a system
require a uses the
would
new language— or more exactly, a new "hand-speech," since it hand rather than the tongue. New symbols would have to be might require a new syntax, a syntax and it might lead away from our present more complex forms of logic and perhaps to new modes
devised to represent
it
in print. It
of multiple pattern relations,
sequential logic to of implication
and thought.
Would this not be an important project to undertake at this moment when we need so much to understand each other better? Explorations in would be worth working on by
a group of the best eleccommunications experts, linguists, psychologists, and child development personnel. Conceivably a few years of intensive effort might produce an invention as revolutionary for personal communication as the invention of the telephone was a hundred years ago. It might take us as far beyond speech as speech took us beyond grunts. Groups of human brains might be able to work together with parallel channels generating intellectual creations and insights far beyond what any one of them could do individually— a thing almost impossible with our verbal single-channel bottleneck in interpersonal communication today. The full possibilities may not even be expressible in our language of verbal communication, any more than the full potentialities of verbal communication could have been expressed in the pre verbal language of grunts. this direction
trical
engineers,
Reshaping biology— li
we can
arrive at a
world structure based on
confident planning and growth, with a good share of the world's budget
devoted to education and science, many other biological possibilities will begin to be explored. The systematic farming of the oceans, the setting up of wildlife preserves, and the control of pollution seem to be almost inevitable trends today, held back only by the present disagreements between nations. The shaping of new plants and animals for various environments, perhaps with chromosome transplants to yield interspecies
hybrids with
new
become big business. Control of make muscles, bones, or brains may become an important study. It may be
characteristics, will
the development of animals so as to larger or
more specialized
coupled with the intensive education and conditioning of animals to give
them novel
skills,
so that they will
become more
intelligent
and
valuable as work animals or pets.
With of
all this, it still
human
seems that human development by the manipulation acknowledged diseases and disorders,
genetics, except to correct
162
I
John R. Piatt
may be postponed
for awhile.
Someday
there might be genetic copying
chromosome combinations purpose could be stored in tissue
of brilhant or talented persons so that their will not
be
lost; tissue
samples for
this
banks for a long time to come. The business of restructuring education, development, and the food supply and of getting used to the new freedoms and prospects may be so absorbing that the further manipulation of
human of
genetics could be delayed until
what we
we have
a better understanding
are doing.
Nevertheless, sometime in the future there will almost certainly be a
demand to explore some of the possible variations in the human and protoplasmic potentiahty— just as an individual today might explore and develop his various talents one after another. When that time comes, there will surely be attempts to make different parts of the brain larger or more complex, so as to make more talented musicians or poets, or more lithe and graceful people, or more talented and sensitive workers general
seems almost inevitable that our children of the generations ahead will try to express, by means of specialization, whatever their value systems have come to esteem at the time, even if it means a different trial arrangement of the bodily organs or the hands or eyes or brain. Is this a reprehensible or dangerous thing? Yes, for men playing with others.
It
carelessly or selfishly or stupidly.
Yes, for Dr.
Frankenstein and Dr.
Moreau. But in the long run it is surely not reprehensible for men going into it with choice and preparation and love for the potentialities of man, and with society's knowledge and approval and society's care for the creatures that are not successful. Is this not what biology has been doing all the time, for billions of years— expanding the brain and changing our posture and limbs? Since some 4 percent of all children born today have observable genetic defects, we know that biology's experiments are still going on. But men have now become the hands of evolution. We have reached the stage where it is time for design instead of happenings by death and accident, and where it is time for anticipation and planning of what new varieties of men can do and how they will work together, instead of leaving it only to the yearning and primitive methods of the choice of a pretty partner
and of learning by
survival.
In addition, of course, the mechanical robots and automata of the
become ever more sophisticated. A few men are make something like a learning nervous system, "grown"
next generation will
already trying to
chemically from millions of solid-state crystals with their filaments making
new
contacts as various input patterns of electrical impulses flow through
them.
If
such a system
is
ever successful, with parallel processing a
million times faster than ours,
it
might be able
to
absorb a lifetime of
experiences in an hour and go through ten million years of evolution of
brain and control circuits in ten years.
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The
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Today one can think of dozens of complex problems for such electronic and to explain to us. Conceivably the most interesting part of life could come to be the interaction with such perceiving-learningknowing devices that could solve our problems so much faster than we can. Some scientists and managers today may already feel that way about their data banks and computers. For, as Hoyle has implied, it is not true that the only ways to interact successfully with a corner of the universe are the ways of the primitive DNA. It is not true that the only way to make brains to solve
a plastic learning intelligence that studies and understands the universe
is
with protoplasm and biological cells and neurons. Marvelous some deep sense all these may be only primitive
as they are to us, in
stages in the evolution of faster Intelligence
any reason
and more complex intelligences. and shaping itself. Is there
the universe understanding
is
why
it
must be limited
to
our beloved protoplasm? This
has not been said clearly except by science
fiction,
are the science fiction of yesterday. It seems that
but
we
all
our
lives
today
are approaching the
when we must
look at these possibilities seriously and without must see which of them are only fiction and which are prophecy, expressing the deep demands of our own evolutionary development and the pressures of the great evolutionary process in which we are caught up, moving on from stage to stage— the process of the
time
We
embarrassment.
universe learning to understand the threshold,
if
we
itself. Is
that so frightening?
We
are at
and clear-eyed whatever form and
survive, of an organism integrated
about fearlessly shaping its future development, in complex combination of enzymes, crystals, and electrons
it
chooses.
WORLD STRUCTURES
What
will
be the structural form, the
of this organism,
man? The kind
social
and organizational form ahead obvi-
of society that lies
ously depends, in a most uncertain way, on the nature of the peacekeeping solutions we happen to arrive at, by design or accident, in the next few years, if we survive. Will there simply be an indefinite continuation of the partition of the world between nuclear superpowers, held in partial
check by
tacit decision rules?
herently unstable, as
we have
seen,
Probably not, because
and
this
is
in-
will soon lead either to nuclear
holocaust or to the adoption of some safer international structure.
Will there be unchecked population growth everywhere until the whole world becomes a crowded starving Indian village? Probably not, because the problem of international structure will have been solved in some way before the population problem becomes absolutely uncontrollable. And an effective world organization will almost certainly be interested in economic growth and well-being and will have ample incentives and means, as we have seen, to control population growth.
164
John R. Piatt Will there be a world dictatorship under some strong oflF
man who
pulls
moment? Possibly, but the advanced governments make dictatorship
a fantastically dangerous bluff at a critical
managerial characteristics of increasingly more difficult. Conversely, a world dictatorship, established,
would be
likely to
become
increasingly run
if one were by committees.
Managerial or committee lock-ins, of course, might be terrifyingly rigid and oppressive. But the whole pressure of industrial technology in the twentieth century has been away from dictatorship and slavery and toward machines with well-paid designers, with more well-being, education, and freedom for the whole population. These are the most profitable directions of development, even for the managers.
This means that there are
still
some grounds
for hope. In spite of
and restraint, and, toward peacemaking, the world might live to see a gradual extension of nuclear agreements, perhaps with an intermittent extension of the effectiveness of the United Nations, or else a world convention to design a more effective and more stable peacekeeping structure. From the point of view of systems theory, considerations of this kind are not politics but collective biology, more important to our escalating
hostilities,
with continuing
the health of
there are signs of stalemate
efforts
man
than his food supply. The essential point
is
that the
only possibilities that are viable in the long run are those in which
man
reaches control of the planet and of his social conflicts and adopts a
peace-keeping system that will really hold the organism together for at
few hundred years. have given us more tested experimental knowledge about the biological, psychological, and social nature of man, his origin, powers, and potentialities, than everything that was known before. It is time to integrate this new knowledge into a picture of man on which future societies— good self-maintaining societies— can be based. What we find is partly what has always been known, that man is a creature of paradoxes. He is a body, but he is also a brain, with curiosity, intelligence, and high complexity. He has been made out of dust, but now he uses the energies of the sun itself. He has been created through evolution, but now he is the principal creator of evolution. And though man is an individual, he is also a social creature. His inleast the next
The
last thirty years
telligence
is
within a shell of bone, but
gences and changes the world.
By
He
it
interacts with other intelli-
shapes his cultures, and then his
be made arrogant or cohowever carefully he is taught or conditioned, his quest for variety sets him exploring new patterns. Man can be studied as an object, but he is also a communicating co-subject who wants to be treated as a person and to help plan the study. His cultures are shaped by collective forces, and yet they can be transformed by a single leader or inventor. He can organize trillion-dollar
cultures shape him.
early training, he can
operative, creative or stultified. Yet,
165
The societies,
Biological Sciences
and yet he stands on
a knife-edge of his
own making between
a vista of abundance and the blackest of eternities.
What would
a
tension? Obviously
be gone.
How
good society be it
dull!
for such a creature of search and could never be a society in which the tension would
Men would gamble demands, new
their lives
on new forms of
daring,
new
make
interesting again. Creative tensions pull the cart of growth. In a
it
political
art,
music, and philosophy, just to
good society the diversity, tension, and dialogue would never be stopped except by the danger of mutual annihilation of men, their work, or ideas. What an education! We are already plunged into it now. A creative and evolving society will be continually driven by the gap and tension between what is and the ever-changing realization of what might be. This is the error-signal that feeds back to stimulate men's ambitions and energies and leads them to new jobs, new inventions, and new movements. In fact, it might be said that the gap between what is and what might be is the "potential energy" that drives all the wheels of society, the only real source of power in the world. Yes, it is a force that is often blocked by habit or social friction or turned into personal profit by men filling a private energy gap of their own, but it presses steadily through classes and nations, breaking up the logjams and recreating the structures until men begin to be satisfied that their hopes and dreams are being met with all reasonable speed. To turn this energy into real advances, an immense amount of social planning will be needed. Nevertheless, a well-educated society will continually resist being dominated or manipulated by planning elites. This is the message of the unrest in the world today, and the reason for the
demand
for "participatory democracy," in the schools, in the ghettos,
and in the "third-force" nations. We are free and independent persons, and we want to be taught rather than ordered, persuaded rather than commanded, bargained with rather than bombed. Someone has defined poverty as the inability to
command
and
events that affect one's
life.
This
and spiritual poverty; more. men will demand to be poor no and well-educated We therefore discover something deeper than democracy— that we are co-subjects in the choosing network— so that from now on what is done must be done not by "social engineering" but by "social cooperation." Over the long run, the intellectual or leader will be successful only if he leads, only if he is not a dictator but a counselor, not the sole designer of the system but the seer and explainer of the consequences of doing things one way rather than another. But when leaders and followers alike come to feel that their effort is mutual and that society's goals are their goals, they will cooperate in vast and difficult projects and be willing to go through fire and death. By sharing in the design, they become willing to accept their part in whatever sacrifice is needed. defines financial poverty
political, intellectual,
166
John R. Piatt
The new
rights
—A
society
is
but the needs and feedbacks of the
individual projected onto the social sky.
It
becomes unstable
if its
lock-ins
continue to deny for very long some important part of a man's conception of himself as a person and a participant. The result is that every age must meet the developing threats and aspirations of the time by redefining the rights and duties of the individual. In one age this requires a Magna Carta; in another, religious tolerance; in another, freedom of speech and of the press; in another, equality of the vote; in another, the rights of women. The present times and those just ahead will be times of increasing crowding, increasing planning on a larger scale, and increasing loss of privacy, from other individuals, from scientific research, and from government agencies. New definitions and new customs will be needed if life is to be tolerable and if the individual is to continue to be able to choose his own values and ways of life, as well-educated men will want to. One of our new rights should be the right to idiosyncrasy. Our lives would be happier, less guilty, and more interesting if we had the same tolerance of idiosyncrasy as of religion. Each of us needs the right to be fat or thin, to sleep when sleepy, and to work at odd hours, to have more diversity of speech, dress, and action, without criticism or group pressure. In fact, it cannot be long before we discover that the pressures of our cities and traffic jams will greatly decrease if we work and play around the clock and around the week and take vacations around the year. We also need to enlarge the rights of children. This is not only for the children's sake but because rejected and undereducated children are expensive to society for the rest of their lives. Every child deserves, and will surely achieve, the rights he would have as a member of a rich man's family. These include the right to be wanted when born, the right to be educated up to his full potentiality and given the best wisdom of society, the right not to be lied to, not to be treated as an object, and the more subtle rights of humor and play and time to be alone and think. We need to enlarge the rights of adults. In an affluent society, the first right is the right to share in the wealth of the world— like a rich man's sons— regardless of accidents of birth. Any society that blocks this possibility
is
in
perpetual danger.
world includes the right
The
right to the real wealth of the
to food, shelter, education,
transport, the right to space, beauty, vacations,
and
communication, and
diversity, the right not
be punished for unavoidable accidents, the right to sex, even in and asylums, and the right to have children without being overcrowded by other men's children. Each of us also needs the right not to be treated as an object. If we are to avoid alienation, we need to participate in the full truth and depth of what life is. We need to treat each other, and to be treated, as co-subjects, as participants and persons. This means something like the to
prisons
167
The right not to
be
lied to
Biological Sciences
by doctors and
officials,
or betrayed
by counselors,
the right not to be manipulated or deceived for scientific experiments,
the right to have grievances heard responsibly and rectified, the right to get information
and
to travel
and
see,
the right of the generations
neither to be separated nor to be pushed together, the right not to be
overanesthetized, and the right to an easy death.
Some
of these
family rights,
They
will
new as
just
demand
a
rights will involve the loss of old financial
democracy involved the
new
loss
of
and
feudal rights.
personal accountability, with the
loss,
for
example, of the right of running away and perhaps also of the right of secrecy in transactions (as represented already by the openness of public
books and the
new
Public Information Law).
They
will certainly
mean
have any number of children or to educate them to superstition or delinquency— rights which even John Stuart Vlill said parents should not have.^ And they will mean a new accountability and a new demand for credibility of all in authority— a demand which is growthe loss of the right to
ing already today.
The eternal options —The idea of an exactly determined and predictable future— the "myth of frozen passage"— is only a myth, even in physics and
Capek has shown. Although we have been brought on the path, and our values and preferences have been shaped, by forces in evolution and in ourselves and our society that are no longer within our control, we see that now; we have learned something; and our choice of the next step of the path is always open-ended. It is open-ended for the individual and for the society, because an amplifying decision-system shapes and manipulates its environment and itself by its own rules which it makes up as it goes along. The future is unpredictable because the freedom of man makes him unpredictable. He is continually open to change, adapting and creating at rates we should not have believed possible before this generation. The result is that one generation's morality may be the next generation's anathema. One generation's brilliant design may be the next generation's black refusal. It is a collective existentialism, in which the world is decided on afresh at every moment, and where no one, neither the fathers nor the books nor God nor a theory of what is best, makes the rules for us except as we choose them freely anew at every moment. Every generation from now on will face something like the same existential and immediate choice we face— the option of suicide or of freedom with efiFort, cooperation, and abundance. We can set up structures to help our children keep from killing themselves by accident and to give them time to think what they are doing, but we cannot force philosophy, as Milic to this point
2
On
Liberty, chap, v;
GBWW,
Vol. 43, p. 317d.
168
John R. Piatt keep these structures and we cannot finally determine their can only demonstrate our own values in the structures we build for them and then acknowledge that the future is open-ended, to be chosen afresh by new men every morning. It is this change from drift to choice, to collective responsibility and commitment, that dominates all the other changes today. It is the change from the adolescent to the man. It is the change from evolution by ignorance and fatal acceptance to evolution by intelligence, anticipation, and decision. It is the change from being run by aristocrats or capitalists or managers to participatory democracy. We have bitten into the apple of knowledge and our eyes are opened. We have been driven out of the Eden of irresponsibility into the world of decision. We now know that it is we who are responsible for shaping the future. Whether we live or die, we will never be able to go back to irresponsibility again.
them
to
values.
We
BIBLIOGRAPHY Ardrey, Robert. African Genesis.
Atheneum
New
Platt, John R. The Step to Man. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1966. Platt, John R. (ed.). New Views of the Nature of Man. Chicap;o: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
York:
Press, 1961.
Bell, Daniel, and the American Academy Commission on the Year 2000. "Toward the Year 2000," Daedalus, XCVI, No. 3 ( Summer, 1967), 639-79.
Bloom, Benjamin
Human
S. Stability
Wiley & Sons,
and Change
New
Characteristics.
York:
Anatol.
Rapoport,
in
John
Inc., 1964.
Brown, Harrison, The Challenge of Man's Future. New York: Compass Books, 1956. DoBZHANSKY, Theodosius. Mankind Evolving.
Theory.
Ann
Game
Two-Person
The
Arbor:
University
of
Michigan Press, 1966. Skinner, B. F. Walden Two. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1965. Skinner, B. F., and Holland, James G. The Analysis of Behavior. Hill Book Co., 1961.
New
York:
McGraw-
Yale University Press, 1962, 1964. EisELEY, Loren C. The Immense Journey. New York: Random House, 1957.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper &
Kahn, Herman, and Wiener, Anthony J. The Year 2000. New York: The Macmillan
Watson, James D. The Double Helix. New York: Atheneum Press, 1968. Whyte, Lancelot Law. Internal Factors in
Bros.,
Co., 1967.
Luce,
Gay G., and Segal, Coward-McCann
York:
Julius. Sleep. Inc.,
New
1966.
Meier, Richard L. Developmental Planning.
New
York:
McGraw-Hill Book
Co.,
1959.
Evolution. 1965.
New
York:
Wolstenholme, Gordon
George (ed.).
Braziller,
Man and
His
Future. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.
1965.
NOTE TO THE READER Piatt's essay can be read as complementing Bagehot's Physics and Politics, reprinted in Part Four. Both concern the relation between science and society; both deal primarily with the effects of the biological sciences; and both writers are profoundly convinced that science is the great and succes.sful instrument for human progress. Bagehot, however, looks mainly backward to the past that led up to his own day, whereas Professor Platt
Professor
169
is looking ahead from where we stand at the present time. Progress is one of the 102 ideas under which the Syntopicon organizes the material of Great Books of the Western World. In the chapter devoted to it the reader will find references to the discussion of that idea and its many ramifications. Science 6b should also be consulted for locating material on the place of science in society.
LEONARD COTTRELL Leonard ton,
Cottrell,
England,
is
horn in 1913 at Tettenhall, near Wolverhamp-
the author of twenty-seven books, principally on
archaeology, history, and travel. Educated at King Edward's
Grammar
School, Birmingham, he
moved, through journalwhich he joined in 1942 as a writer-director of documentary programs. During the Second World War he was a BBC war correspondent and afterwards traveled extensively, covering about one million miles and reporting from twenty-five countries. An amateur archaeologist from the age of nine, he wrote his first archaeological book, The Lost Pharaohs, in 1950, basing it largely on his own studies of Egypt and the information he had received from Egyptologists who believed that a need existed for an introduction to Egyptology written mainly with a lay public in mind. The popularity of this and his later books, including his best-selling Bull of Minos (1953), persuaded him, in 1959, to resign from the British Broadcasting Corporation and concentrate entirely on authorship. The subjects of his numerous books range from ancient Egypt to Roman Britain, including Life Under the Pharaohs (1955), The first
ism, to the British Broadcasting Corporation
Great Invasion (1958), Hannibal, Enemy of Rome (1961), The Horizon Book of Lost Worlds (1962), and The Lion Gate (1963). He edited The Concise Encyclopedia of Archaeology (1960) and also contributes to learned periodicals and the BBC Third Programme. He is married to Diana Bonakis, a poet, and lives in the Cotswold Hills, in Gloucestershire, England. At present he is working on a biography of the distinguished Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie.
170
Archaeology As
Dr. Galliani observed in the time of Louis XIV,
Jr\. animal His body
is
who
takes an interest in things
physically
mind— "looking
"Man
the only
is
which don't concern him."
weak compared with many other
animals, but his
before and after"— can assess his situation and carry over
knowledge acquired by his forefathers: to fashion tools and weapons, where the best hunting grounds were, and how to appease the gods. For many thousands of years, down to about 3200 b.c, this information could be transmitted only by speech; and even after this approximate date, the art of writing and record-keeping was known only in a few favored into the next generation part of the
how
to
make and maintain
fire,
how
lands.
The purpose
of this essay
Europe and the Middle
is (a)
to
show how archaeology,
especially in
from treasure-hunting into show how its scope has been
East, has developed
a reliable adjunct of written history; (b) to
enlarged to extend far beyond the "historical horizon"
vastly
written records began; and
niques that, during the past
when
demonstrate some of the newer techyears, have extracted from the earth more
(c) to fifty
information about, for example, the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the
Romans
than, in
many
cases, they possessed themselves.
There was a time, not very long ago, when the past revealed through archaeology and that depicted from documents touched at very few points; a time when the late Sir Arthur Evans, discoverer of Europe's oldest civilization, wrote to his friend, the scholar Edward A. Freeman: ". There is [at Oxford] going to be established a Professorship of Archaeology, and I have been strongly advised to stand. I do not think I shall unless I see any real prospect of getting it. To begin with, it is to be called the Professorship of Classical Archaeology ... To confine a Professorship of Archaeology to classical times seems to me as reasonable as ." to create a chair of Insular Geography' or 'Mezozoic Geology' Freeman, in a sympathetic reply, advised Evans to apply, though warning him that "they will have some narrow Balliol fool, suspending all sound learning at the end of his crooked nose, to represent self-satisfied ignorance against you, but I would go in just to tell them a thing or two." So Evans, at that time a young, unknown scholar, did apply for the post, "told them a thing or two," and, of course, was turned down, losing the chair to Percy Gardner, a "classical" archaeologist more acceptable .
.
.
.
to the authorities at Victorian Oxford.
171
.
.
Archaeology I
mention
this story
because
it
illustrates the
dichotomy which once
separated archaeology from history. Later the pendulum, as usual, swung too far in the opposite direction, so that an Oxford literary don, irritated
by what seemed
him the arrogance
to
of
some archaeological
colleagues,
wrote:
But 'tis not verse, and But pottery alone
'tis
not prose,
Which tells us all that Man And all that may be known.
has been .
.
There has always been rivalry between the historian, who relies mainly on what men have written, and the archaeologist, who reaches beyond the horizon represented by literary records and oral tradition by interpreting the things men made and left behind. By comparison with the historian, the archaeologist is a newcomer on the scene, and it is only within the past century and a half that the study of objects, from Paleolithic flint axes to ancient Egyptian temples, has been accepted as having any scientific value. Gibbon, making the Grand Tour of Europe, saw and admired Roman buildings, but he could have written The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire without any reference to the visible remains of the Roman epoch. In his day, the archaeologist was called an antiquarian, and while historians of Britain, for instance, were happy to make use of the writings of John Leland and Sir William Dugdale, these assiduous researchers were looked upon mainly as archivists. When it came to the Roman period, evidences of which were scattered widely throughout Great Britain, the historians depended mainly on the scanty references in the works of Tacitus, Suetonius, and others, eked out by the observations of the Venerable Bede and the wild fabrications of GeofiFrey of Monmouth. In fact, until the middle of the nineteenth century the "antiquarian"— predecessor of the modern, scientific archaeologistwas usually regarded as a romantic, a collector of "curios," a fantasist whose world merged with that of the poet.
What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond
all
conjecture.
What
time the persons of these ossuaries
entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors,
solution. But who were the prowhat bodies these ashes made up, were
might admit a wide
prietaries of these bones, or
a question above antiquarianism, vision for their
names
as they
.
.
.
Had
have done
they
made
as
good prohad
for their relics, they
not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist bones, and be but pyramidally extant,
1
Urn-Burial;
GGB,
Vol. 10, p. 576.
172
is
a fallacy in duration.^
in
Leonard
Cottrell
Sir Thomas Browne in the seventeenth some "Urnes lately found in Norfolk." Archaeologists today do not write such stately prose— more is the pitybut one cannot blame them. For, in our day, archaeology has progressed beyond mere antiquarianism. Speculation is now confined within rigid limits. Today any competent first-year student, digging up those "Urnes" in a Norfolk field, would be able to date them— Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age— by relating them to other burials of similar type, not only in Britain but in Europe, and slot them neatly into his card-index file. The same would apply to an American, French, German, Russian, Chinese
So wrote the Norwich physician
century, reflecting sonorously on
student, whether working in his
own
country or abroad. For
now
there
where once was only speculation. however, a new development which has
are accepted rules
There is, little to do with advances in archaeological technique, or with the uneasy rapprochement
and that revealed by excavation; and that is men and women throughout the civilized world, in the origins of civilization. At a time when the advance of science has opened vast new prospects of man's future, when Freud and his followers have given us fresh and at times terrifying insights into the springs of human conduct, when the physicist and the chemist have revealed possibilities of modifying not only our physical environment but our very natures, more and more people are looking backward in time, seeking an answer to the old question, "How did it between
"literary" history
the increasing interest, on the part of millions of
all
begin?"
This curiosity reveals
itself at
several levels.
On
the one hand, the un-
earthing of a small Mithraic temple in the heart of
queues of sightseers star at a premiere.
in
On
numbers that would have the other hand,
we
London produced Hollywood
flattered a
see distinguished poets, dram-
new works of art based on the same myths that inspired Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Freud. Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Robert Graves, and others return repeatedly to the legends that originated during the childhood of mankind. Michael Tippett writes an opera called "King Priam." Giraudoux rewrites the Amphytrion legend. Henry Miller is excited by Mycenae— and so is Alan Ginsberg. Even as uncompromisingly modern a poet as Christopher Logue is compelled to attempt a new translation of part of The Iliad. Admittedly, artists have been drinking from these primal springs of inspiration since long before archaeological research added a new dimension. But this increasing awareness of our past, the gradual closing of the gap between legend, written history, and archaeologically revealed fact has intensified our experience of life. More than at any time in the atists,
past,
composers, novelists, and painters producing
man
is
a creature "looking before
Archaeology
itself is
and
nothing more or
173
after."
less
than exploration, "anthro-
Archaeology Margaret Murray described it. Man As far back as the seventh century B.C., the Pharaohs ruling from Sais reverently studied and copied the monuments of ancestors who had died two thousand years earlier. Medieval and Renaissance popes collected Greek and Roman antiquities. In 1646 an Oxford professor named John Greaves, commissioned by Archbishop Laud to study and report on the Egyptian pyramids, which he did very expertly, published his conclusions in a work called Pyramipology is
in the past" as the late Dr.
insatiably curious about his past.
Roman architecture and was responspawning neo-Roman mansions all over Europe. In the eighteenth century, the brothers Adam induced British fox-hunting squires to tear down their ancestral homes and replace them with new ones in the most refined ancient Greek taste. And Napoleon Bonaparte, after his abortive expedition to Egypt, stimulated an interest in ancient Egypt which led to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs and the birth of dographia. Andrea Palladio revived sible for
Egyptology. Formerly, this curiosity about the past was confined mainly to an educated minority, but nowadays, thanks to the growth of education and the worldwide reporting of archaeological discoveries, this interest has spread to vast numbers of people. Fear of the future may also play its part, but there is no doubt that archaeological technique is advancing more rapidly than at any time in the past, and that more and more people are interested in the results. But to explain the full extent and scope of the new techniques and discoveries it is necessary to show how archaeology has developed from mere treasure-hunting to something approaching a scientific discipline.
The first phase, that of mere treasure-hunting, has already been touched upon. It occurred at several levels, from the Egyptian fellah plundering the tombs of his ancestors to the European dilettante searching for Greek or Roman statuary to add to his collection. Both were basically treasure-hunters in that neither was seeking for knowledge but only for objects of value. However, not all antiquarians were indifiFerent to the light that their discoveries could throw upon man's history. A few recognized this and even anticipated modern archaeological techniques. One such pioneer was Thomas Jefferson. In 1784 Jefferson excavated an Indian burial mound near the Rivanna River in Virginia. His motive was to test the truth of a statement that such mounds were the tombs of warriors who had been buried in a standing position. His account shows that he conducted the excavation in a systematic and scientific manner. "Appearances certainly indicate," he wrote, "that it has derived both origin and growth from the accustomary collection of bones, and the deposition of them together; that the first collection had been deposited on the common surface of the earth, a few stones put over it, and then a covering of earth, that the second had been 174
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-
THIS BUNDLE OF LEGAL DOCUMENTS, WHICH DATE FROM 88 TO 135 A.D., WAS FOUND IN A CLIFFSIDE
f
CAVE NEAR THE DEAD SEA. REFUGEES FROM PRINCE BAR KOCHBa's JEWISH UPRISING DIED IN THE CAVE, LEAVING THESE LETTERS AND THEIR LIVING EQUIPMENT, WHICH WERE DISCOVERED IN 1961 certain
Old Testament
scriptures,
i
and that some
j'
of their prophetic writ-
ing appears to anticipate the teachings of Jesus Christ.
The matter
is
highly controversial, and while some authorities seem to regard the scrolls as
evidence that the basic precepts of Christianity were
before the birth of Christ (and possibly that
He
known
studied under the Es-
senes), others take the contrary view.
Another dramatic excavation,
time in Israel, in 1965, was that of Masada, on an almost impregnable high point above the Dead Sea. Here another fanatical sect resisted the Romans after the fall of Jerusalem, finally committing mass suicide when the legionaries breached their walls and stormed the citadel. The operation was described by the Jewish historian Josephus; and when the Israeli archaeologist Y. Yadin investigated the site, aided by hundreds of volunteer helpers from all over the world, he found clear evidence that Josephus had been right. The Roman siege-works, including their camps, the walls they built to prevent the defenders escaping, and the mighty ramp on which they mounted their siege engines for the ultimate assault, can still be seen, exactly as Josephus described them; another example of the verification of literary history by archaeology. But this too was "in-filling"— spectacular and imaginative in its conception, but in fact telling us little about man's history that we did not already know. Far more important archaeologically is the revelation, mainly over the past twenty to thirty years, that what used to be called loosely the "Bible Lands" were among the places where civilization began on earth. And here it is helpful to look back over the past century and to note how, just as in Egypt, men began by examining or looking for remains of known historical monuments— in this case towns and the mountain fortress of
Herod
this
at
197
Archaeology Bible— and then were drawn by their discoveries illustrate what the late Gordon Childe called the "Neolithic Revolution." This was the period, thousands of years before the birth of Egyptian civilization, when in a few favored places sites
mentioned
in the
to investigate sites
man
which
momentous step which was ultimately to lead to a settled and the beginning of civilization— the period when, having learned how to grow crops from wild grasses and to domesticate took the
communal
life
animals, he ceased to be a wandering hunter.
One can
trace Palestinian archaeology
Fund was founded
back
to 1865,
when
the Pales-
and systematic investigation of the archaeology, the topography, the geology and physical geography, the manners and customs of the Holy Land, for Biblical illustration." The last three words sum up the motive. As Kathleen Kenyon remarks in her Archaeology in the Holy Land (1960), "It would be true to say that early in the nineteenth century the Jews were the one nation in the ancient Near East with which the European was familiar the Land of the Bible was a potential source of interest exceeding the still rather shadowy empires of Assur-bani-pal and Sargon or Thothmes and Rameses." It is not surprising, therefore, that the foundation of the Palestine Exploration Fund preceded that of the Egypt Exploration Fund. What these early excavators were looking for was tine Exploration
.
.
for "the accurate
.
something to confirm their Chirstian faith; if they could prove the historical reality of towns and cities mentioned in the Bible, this would help strengthen their beliefs and perhaps help stem the tide of skepticism aroused by the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution.
WHILE DIGGING BENEATH THE FOUNDATIONS OF MASADA, ISRAEL, YIGAEL YADIN AND HIS TEAM OF PORTIONS OF TWO BIBLICAL PARCHMENT SCROLLS. BOOKS OF DEUTERONOMY AND
AN ANCIENT SYNAGOGUE IN ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVERED THEY ARE PORTIONS OF THE EZEKIEL
Leonard Cottrell
What
they were not looking for in Palestine and Syria were relics of
Stone Age Man.
And
yet, at the
same period,
in France,
Britain,
and
other countries of Western Europe, scholars were assiduously searching in the gravels of
Norfolk and in the cave-shelters of the Dordogne Valley
Age) relics such as flint axes, awls, scrapers, and spearheads dating from a period immensely more remote than that of the Bible, or even of Zoser's Step Pyramid. They even classified such implements. Those made by chipping pieces of flint were Paleolithic or Old Stone Age; those bearing a polished surface and evidencing a more sophisticated craftsmanship were called Neolithic (New Stone Age). But what these early investigators in Europe at first failed to recognize was that this change marked something much more revolutionary than a mere improvement in tools and weapons; it often marked a complete change in a way of life, from the nomadic hunter, perpetually wandering in search of wild game, to the settled pastoralist and agriculturalist. Those who went out to Jericho in 1868 and conducted deep and extensive excavations came away satisfied that the double walls they had found at a certain level were those which Joshua had successfully assaulted at a date which they conjectured was around 1400 b.c. (much too early, as it subsequently turned out). But digging much deeper into the great mound or "tell" on which ancient Jericho stood, they came upon stone implements produced by men who had lived there many thousands of years before Joshua was born. Some of these implements John Garstang identified as Mesolithic, an intermediate period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic phases. It was all very puzzling. for Paleolithic (Old Stone
Clarification came when later excavators, particularly Kathleen Kenyon and her Anglo-American team, reexamined Jericho at a time when dating could be much more precise. Similar finds were made at other sites; some were "tells" marking the sites of cities known in later Biblical times. Others were unnamed and unknown. Childe, who was primarily a European archaeologist interested in the origins of European civilization, was drawn irresistibly to the lands of the eastern Mediterranean as his curious, questing
mind sought
for beginnings. Eventually
the conclusion that his Neolithic Revolution,
when men
first
he reached learned to
be farmers, had its origin in the so-called Fertile Crescent which runs from the Nile Valley in the west to the Tigris-Euphrates valleys in the east by way of the Palestinian coastal strip and the fertile land which stretched from the mountains of Asia Minor to the fringes of the Arabian desert.
Among work on
the archaeologists this
remote period
who have done some is
of the
Miss Kenyon, and the
most important which she
site to
gave the closest attention was Jericho. It is represented by a mound of about ten acres in extent, is about seventy feet high, and owes its existence to a perennial spring which wells out of the ground nearby and is 199
The Jericho Tell
()1 MIAl IS ()\1. OF THE OLDEST SURVIVING PIECES OF FOOD
THIS SLAI5
i
REED AND RUSH MAT FLOOR-COVERINGS FROM NEOLITHIC HOUSES IN THE JERICHO TELL
Kathleen Kenyon and
her team of archaeolohave been excavating Jericho for several years. They have learned about cultures which lived on that site in pre-Biblical and pregists
Age
Iron
made
times.
The
portrait-skull
(left)
long before Egyptians practised
fication,
was
mummi-
was made with the same idea of The archaeknow what the people ate and what houses they lived in. Knowing these but
it
preserving the dead man's identity. ologists sorts of
things
PLASTERED NEOLITHIC PORTRAIT-SKULL AFTER CONSERVATION WORK
we
can
SQUARE-SHAFT TYPE TOMB OF THE INTERMEDIATE EARLY BRONZE-MIDDLE BRONZE PERIOD, CONTAINING A SKELETON, JAVELIN, DAGGER, AND POTS
imt^
^^3l*>
Tlf'>^'^h^
i*^
now
calculate their local crops
and their involvement in animal husbandry. Study of stratification has yielded a history of invasions and reconstruction periods on the site.
Archaeology probably fed from some underground river. From her investigations Miss Kenyon has now proved that Jericho has been occupied for at least eight thousand years and is probably the oldest inhabited city on earth. By comparison, the great cities of Egypt did not come into existence until after about 2800 b.c. But there is an important difiFerence. By 3200 b.c. Egypt was a united kingdom under one ruler, whereas Jericho, and other Levantine cities like it, were isolated settlements. We can say, therefore, that whereas the
groundwork
of civilization— the establishment of small
communities dependent on agriculture and stock-rearing rather than hunting— began in the middle part of the Fertile Crescent somewhere between 10000 and 5000 b.c, true civilization developed at the tips of the Crescent, along the Nile Valley and the Tigris-Euphrates valleys. The reason was that only these great river valleys could support a large population of agriculturalists, the rivers providing a swift and easy means of communication throughout the entire land. The same development occurred somewhat later along the Indus Valley and its tributaries in India. These civilized communities were produced at a time when man, having at last freed himself from the necessity of following wild game, and having cultivated cereals from wild grasses and domesticated some of the animals he formerly used to hunt, could build permanent houses, found cities, and cultivate the land and also his mind. Some of these men, able now to live ofiF the labor of others, had leisure to think and invent. Man's artistic instincts, no longer confined to incising patterns on bones and painting ritualistic scenes on cave walls, were free to create temples and palaces of well-hewn stone, particularly when the discovery of metals enabled him to fashion fine cutting tools of bronze, an alloy of tin and copper. Thus another group of specialists came into being, the workers in metal who jealously guarded their craft. Stone tools, however, continued to be used for long periods, as metal settled
was
and expensive
rare
small numbers
tively
until the
of
coming
of iron. It also
warrior-aristocrats,
who
meant
alone
that rela-
could afford
bronze weapons, could dominate large subject populations. Herodotus was familiar with the great and ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but he had no idea how they came into being. Only archaeology, which can penetrate far beyond the "historical horizon" represented by written records, can tell us that. Moving now to Mesopotamia, we find in Herodotus a magnificent description of Babylon as
it
existed in his day.
city stands on a broad plain, and is an exact square, a hundred and twenty furlongs in length each way, so that the entire circuit is four hundred and eighty furlongs. While such is its size, in magnificence there is no other city that approaches to it. It is surrounded, in the first place, by a broad and deep moat, full of water, behind which rises a wall fifty royal cubits in width, and two hundred in
The
202
Leonard height. ...
On
Cottrell
the top, along the edges of the wall, they constructed
chamber facing one another, leaving between them room for a four-horse chariot to turn. In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of brass, with brazen lintels and side-posts. The houses are mostly three and four stories high; the streets all
buildings of a single
.
.
.
run in straight
Herodotus,
who
lines,
.
.
visited
J^
Babylon when
it
was under Persian
described "the sacred precinct of Jupiter Belus" with
its
rule, also
"tower of solid
masonry, a furlong in length and breadth," built in eight stages with a path leading round the tower to a spacious temple at the top, the "Tower
Old Testament. He also mentioned the palace of the Babylonian kings which was described in greater detail by Diodorus Siculus (c. 40 B.C.), who wrote of the "hanging gardens" of Queen Semirof Babel" of the
Once it became practicable for Western travelers to travel to the Middle East—which had been virtually barred to Europeans since the end of the Crusades— a few venturesome spirits made the journey. They had been stirred by the accounts of Herodotus and other pagan writers, and equally by the fact that they were exploring the "lands of the Bible." If the ruins of Babylon still existed, then why not Nineveh, Nimrud, and Ur of the Chaldees? But so far the main impetus driving men toward archaeological exploration was literary, when it was not mere lust for plunder. When the pioneer Claudius Rich arrived at Babylon in 1811, accompanied by his young wife, he wrote: amis.
I
thought that
I
should have distinguished some traces, however
many
principal structures. ... I imagined I should have said "here were the walls and such must have been the extent of the area. There stood the palace, and this most assuredly was the tower of Belus." I was completely deceived; instead of a few isolated mounds I found the whole country covered with vestiges of
imperfect, of the
buildings.
But instead of sentimentalizing over the ruins. Rich measured and drew what he could of them and published his findings for the benefit of future archaeologists. His Memoirs on the Ruins of Babylon, originally published in Vienna, is illustrated by careful drawings, maps, and plans. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century Mesopotamia drew increasing numbers of investigators, though not all were as scrupulous as Rich.
Some modern
archaeologists deplore the activities of these pioneers,
and wish that the
sites
could have been
when modern techniques would have 5 Ibid.
I.
178-80;
p.
40b-d.
203
left
undisturbed until today,
extracted
more information from
A VIEW OF THE EXCAVATED ISHTAR GATE, LOOKING SOUTH FROM PROCESSION STREET. ALTHOUGH THE SCALE IS GREATER, THE BRICKW^ORK IS SIMILAR TO THAT USED TODAY
THIS LION WAS RECONSTRUCTED BY GERMAN ARCHAEOLOGISTS FROM REMAINS FOUND ON THE ISHTAR GATE. IT AND THE FIGURE BELOW WERE MADE OF
GLAZED CERAMIC TILE. WHILE THE LION SHOWS CAREFUL ANATOMICAL OBSERVATION, THE MYTHOLOGICAL FIGURE UNITES CHARACTERISTICS OF BIRD, REPTILE, AND MAMMAL
DURING URS FOURTH MILLENNIUM, MEN WORSHIPPED THIS SNAKEHEADED MOTHER AND CHILD
THE CODE OF HAMMURABI AND A BAS-RELIEF OF THE KING BEFORE THE SUN GOD SHAMASH THIS STELE BEARS
THESE ANATOLIAN BRONZE BULL STATUETTES WERE MOUNTED ON STAKES TO SERVE AS GRAVE ORNAMENTS
BRONZE HEAD OF THE MESOPOTAMIAN KING SARGON IS OVER 4000 YEARS OLD
THIS
PEACE SIDE OF MOSAIC STANDARD FROM UR SHOWING GIFT-BEARERS AT BANQUET. OBVERSE SIDE SHOWS A BATTLE
Archaeology them. However, leaving known sites untouched would not necessarily have preserved them, as can be shown from several examples. One is the work of Sir Henry Layard at Nineveh. In the 1840's he excavated and removed to England the superb sculptured Assyrian winged lions and bas-reliefs which once adorned the palace of Sennacherib— works of art which, had they been discovered by the Arabs, would undoubtedly have been destroyed, since to the fanatical Muslims of that period any "graven image" was an abomination. Nowadays, under the enlightened administration of the government of Iraq, they would have been safe; but not in 1849. Similar statues and reliefs, excavated by the Frenchman £mile Botta, are preserved in the Louvre and some enrich American museums. To Layard the lure of Nineveh lay not only in the splendid sculpture which he discovered but in the fact that he was seeing, for the first time, representations of the dreaded Assyrians in the "bloody city" which
Nahum had
execrated.
Thy shepherds
slumber,
the dust; thy people
is
O
king of Assyria; thy nobles shall dwell
scattered
in
upon the mountains and no man
gathereth them. (3:18)
This was another example of "Biblical archaeology," the same impetus which had led Garstang to investigate Jericho, and many other explorers to dig in the Middle East in the nineteenth century. But just as in Egypt and the Levant, what had begun with the investigation of sites known from literary sources developed, during the twentieth century, into a probing deep beyond the "historical horizon" to the disco\'ery of a civilization far older than Assyria or Babylon. This was Sumeria, the Biblical "Land of Shinar" lying along the lower Euphrates. The account of its discovery reads like a good detective story. By 1849, when Layard unearthed the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, Sir Henry Rawlinson and other scholars had begun to decipher the so-called Babylonian cuneiform writing which was found inscribed on baked-clay tablets at several sites. When Layard discovered part of the royal Assyrian library consisting of over twenty-six thousand tablets, a
new
stimulus was given to the task of decipherment. Before very long
which had been the lingua franca of Western Asia more than two thousand years, yielded up its secrets. The eflFect upon Mesopotamian archaeology— and later that of Asia Minor— was immense. The Assyrian inscriptions found at Nineveh and dating from the eighth century B.C. could now be read in association with the scenes depicted, and many Biblical correlations were found, e.g., the siege of Lachish mentioned in the Second Book of Kings was actually depicted in one of the this writing system,
for
reliefs
But
found in Sennacherib's palace. was only a beginning. Soon
this
it
Assyrian library consisted of copies of
206
was realized
much
earlier
that
much
of the
documents that
Leonard
Cottrell
originated in Sumeria, in lower Mesopotamia, and fresh expeditions
went and this time, thanks to the decipherment of the cuneiform system, what had been mere mounds of crumbling mudbrick could be identified as named cities. Such names as Erech, Akkad, Calneh, and Ur of the Chaldees stepped out of the Book of Genesis and became real. A number of American expeditions share the honor of these discoveries, especially at Nippur, where an enormous cache of tablets was found, first by H. V. Hilprecht and later by successive American scholars. Eventually it was realized that long before the rise of Babylon and Assyria there had existed in the lower parts of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys a powerful and advanced civilization which was in being before 3000 b.c, more than twenty-five hundred years before Nebuchadnezzar reigned from Babylon. This Sumerian civilization could rival Egypt in antiquity, and the art of writing began there at about the same time that the hieroglyphic system was invented in Egypt; in fact, it is forth to explore this land,
owed something to problems exercising the minds of the Sumerian. One of the fascinating modern Egyptologists is the extent to which Egyptian civilization owed its origin to immigrants from lower Mesopotamia.
now
generally accepted that the Egyptian system
There are some remarkable resemblances between the two cultures, the "paneled-facade" type of architecture which is found in both early Egypt and Sumeria, and the resemblance between certain hieroglyphic signs and those used by the early Sumerian scribes. Emery, whose investigation of the First and Second Dynasty mastaba-tombs of Egypt has already been touched on, firmly believes that the foundation of Egyptian civilization about 3200 b.c. owes its origin to the invasion of a "master race" which brought with them some of the crafts and skills developed by the Sumerians; he does not, however, necessarily imply that these invaders came from Sumeria; they might have come from some intermediate place which has yet to be discovered, perhaps bordering the Arabian coast of the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. This, of course, remains a theory, and not all scholars support Emery. The generally accepted view is that, although there may have been foreign influences at work, there was no mass invasion, but that the ancient Egyptians created their own unique civilization. Emery's intriguing theory is well set out in his book Archaic Egypt (1962). e.g., in
One
of the
most remarkable discoveries made
in
Sumeria was at Ur of Leonard Wool-
the Chaldees, Abraham's birthplace. In the twenties Sir
came upon rich tombs of important personages, possibly kings and who had been buried accompanied by a holocaust of human victims. Thanks to improvements in technique, this excavation was carried out with the scrupulous care which characterized all Woolley's work, and he showed great ingenuity in preserving the fragile objects, such as a gold-plated harp carried by one of the immolated attendants. The inley
queens,
207
Archaeology strument had almost perished save for
its golden ornaments and inlays But its imprint remained in the earth so that Sir Leonard and his staflF were able to reconstruct it on a new wooden frame. A generation earlier archaeologists would have been unable to
of semiprecious stones.
preserve
it.
The Ur tombs dated from between 2700 and 2500 b.c, but within the broadening prospect of Mesopotamian archaeology this date is comparatively recent. For by this time, the twenties and thirties, archaeologists had begun to recognize a pattern of emergent civilization over the whole of the Fertile Crescent. Like Petrie in Egypt, they were more and more concerned with tracing the origin of these early cultures. The mounds or Mesopotamia, signifying human occupation over vast periods were no longer puzzling, unidentifiable heaps of mud-brick as they had appeared to Rich. The new generation of investigators— the French at Kish, the Americans at Nippur and elsewhere, the Germans at Warka, the British at Ur— knew how to recognize and record each suc"tells" of
of time,
cessive occupation-layer
down
to the virgin soil.
named after the type-site where been found; the Al Ubaid, the Jamdat
Various cultures were discovered and characteristic pottery
had
first
To take but one sample, Woolley excavated at Al Ubaid near Ur a mound at the base of which he found evidence of the very first settlement: remains of the simple reed huts on one of the fertile islands which were emerging, some six thousand or more years ago, as the delta began to dry up. For during the past six millennia the silting up of the mouths of the rivers has caused the Persian Gulf to recede, leaving dry land behind. Many similar sites have been found since, extending from Iraq through the Levant up as far as Asia Minor. Some of these settlements had been occupied for brief periods and then deserted. Some had been occupied, abandoned, and then reoccupied. Others, like Jericho, had developed over many centuries into large towns with substantial fortifications, streets, temples, and houses. But deep down, at the base of the mounds on which they stood, lay the simple stone tools of the first Neolithic settlers. A number of the Bibhcal cities besides Jericho had owed their origins to such primitive settlements six or seven thousand years ago. Sumerian literature, as revealed in the tablets, ranged from historical chronicles to law codes, "wisdom literature" (like the Proverbs), and personal letters. One amusing example of the wisdom literature reads: Nasr, the Uruk cultures are three examples.
You can have But the
And
man
a King, and you can have a Lord is the tax-collector.
to fear
.
.
.
here are a few others picked at random from many: Friendship lasts a day Kinship endures for ever.
208
Leonard Cottrell And:
Who
has not supported a wife or child, His nose has not borne a leash. .
.
.
from certain Sumerian poems, that the story of the Deluge originated in Sumeria. One poem, which probably dates from before 2700 b.c, bears such a strong resemblance to that of Noah's Ark as to make it tolerably certain that the Genesis version derives ultimately from Sumeria, where disastrous floods were a frequent There
is
also strong evidence,
occurrence.
watched the appearance of the weather. Consternation over Adad reaches the heavens, Turning to blackness all that had been light. The wide land was shattered like (a pot)! For one day the south storm (blew) Gathering speed as it blew Overtaking the people like a battle. No-one can see his fellow, Nor can people be recognised from heaven Six days and six nights Blows the flood wind, as the south storm sweeps the land. When the seventh day arrived. The sea grew quiet, the tempest was still, the flood ceased. I looked at the weather; stillness had set in And all of mankind had returned to clay. The landscape was as level as a flat roof. I
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The author of the poem, who has taken refuge in a ship, accompanied by "the seed of all living things," opens a hatch. Light falls on his face. Bowing
low,
I
Tears running
On Mount
down and wept. down my face.
sat
.
came
Nisir the ship
Allowing no motion.
.
.
.
.
to a halt.
.
and set free a dove. The dove went forth, but came back; There was no resting-place for it and she turned round. Then I set forth and set free a raven. The raven went forth, and, seeing that the waters had diminished, He eats, circles, caws, and turns not round. Then I let our (all) to the four winds I
sent forth
.
And It is
offered a sacrifice.
.
.
.
.
.^
customary to write of the "Flood-myth," but there was nothing
mythical about the Sumerian floods. Digging under the deeper levels at
Ur
of the Chaldees,
ing no trace of
6
S.
Woolley revealed thick layers of sediment containoccupation, though the levels above and below
human
N. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer
(New
209
York, Doubleday, 1959).
Archaeology
THE CUNEIFORM TABLET ON THE LEFT IS FROM UR. IT DEALS WITH THE DISPOSAL OF DEAD CATTLE TURNED IN BY SHEPHERDS 4000 YEARS AGO. THE TABLET ON THE RIGHT BEARS THE LAW CODE OF ESHNUNNA did contain such evidence.
It is
said to have
coming upon her husband and a group
been Lady Woolley who,
of puzzled archaeologists con-
templating one of these blank layers, casually remarked "But of course; that
was the Flood," and walked away.
In fact,
we now know
that ancient Sumeria
great floods at various times, as diflFerent levels.
One
is
shown by
was devastated by
several
layers of clean sediment at
must have formed the by the Hebrews in their own more likely to have taken place
of these catastrophic deluges
basis of the story in Genesis, incorporated
such an event is far on the banks of a great flooding river, than in mountainous Palestine. It has been suggested that the story had been learned by the Hebrews during their captivity in Babylon, but it could equally well have been a folk-tradition absorbed by the Israelites during literature. Certainly
in low-lying Sumeria,
the long years of wandering, long before they settled in Palestine.
The rich and abundant store of baked-clay tablets excavated by the American archaeologists at Nippur, Shurrupak, and elsewhere has by no means been exhausted, and thousands of tablets still await interpretation. Samuel Kramer may well be right when he entitles one of his books History Begins at Sumer. For though the Assyrians and the Babylonians of later times utilized the language which the Sumerians invented, and carefully preserved Sumerian literary texts, there is no doubt the earliest written records of man's achievements in civilization originated in
Lower
Mesopotamia, and were closely followed by those of the Nile Valley.
210
Leonard
Cottrell
THE HITTITES cuneiform The especially for
writing system was used throughout Western Asia,
diplomatic correspondence between rulers, and has
therefore thrown light on the history of other countries far remote from
Sumeria.
One
of these
was the
Hittite empire, the capital of
which was
Hattusas, on the high central tableland of Anatolia, where the archaeologist
Hugo Winckler
discovered
German
thousands of tablets,
some
written in Babylonian cuneiform and others in a script which was at first called Arwazan, from the name Arwaza which occurred in it, the only word which could at first be deciphered. But German scholarship eventually interpreted the language, which turned out to be that of the Hittites. Arwaza was merely one of their provinces.
The Hebrews knew the Hittites; one has only to recall Uriah the Hitwhose wife Bathsheba King David coveted, and the "Sons of Heth" who sold Abraham a burial place at Machpelah near Hebron. The puzzling fact, however, was that there were also references in Egyptian inscriptions and letters to a people called the "Kheta" and the "Land of Khatti," formidable foes of Egypt at the height of her power, which was between 1500 and 1250 B.C., more than two centuries before the Hittites tite,
King David's time, who appeared to be only a minor tribe occupying Were the "Kheta" and the Hittites the same people? And if so, what had been their homeland, since so powerful a race as to have challenged Egypt must have had territory and a capital city? Apart from the Bible and the Egyptian inscriptions (if indeed these did refer to the Hittites) and certain Assyrian texts, there are no literary allusions to them; by Greco-Roman times they had been entirely forgotten. Here of
part of Syria.
again archaeology came to the rescue.
Long before Winckler found the tablets at Bogazkoy, certain stones unknown form of writing had been noted at Hamath and Aleppo, two places in Syria. Again, in Asia Minor explorers had described inscribed in an
huge sculptured
reliefs
depicting men, and apparently gods and god-
on the mountainsides, and these were usuaccompanied by inscriptions in the same unknown writing system. Up to 1897 no tablets had been found, apart from a letter from the Hittite king Suppiluliumas (Suppililiumas) found in the Foreign Office files of the Pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt, congratulating that king on his accession, which was in- 1370 b.c. A British scholar, Archibald Sayce, put forward the bold theory that these inscriptions were in the Hittite language, and that their homeland had been in Anatolia. Attention was focused on one particular site, Bogazkoy, where on a high buttress of rock between two fast-flowing rivers stood the substantial remains of an ancient city girdled by walls fourteen feet thick and pierced at intervals by mighty gates guarded by sculptured figures of desses, carved in rocky clefts ally
211
Archaeolo^ij
IN 1925 B.C., BILALAMA RULED ESHNUNNA AND DIRECTED THE BUILDING OF HIS TOMB. HE SPECIFIED THAT EVERY BRICK IN THE STRUCTURE SHOULD BEAR A HIEROGLYPHIC LEGEND IDENTIFYING HIM AND THE PURPOSE OF THE BRICK, SO THAT SHOULD THE BRICKS BE REUSED HIS IDENTITY WOULD NOT BE LOST
and men. No one knew how old it was or who had built it, but from the style of the art it certainly was not medieval. When, in 1906, Winckler and his stafiF unearthed ten thousand baked-clay tablets from the foundations of a building within the walls that was apparently either a temple or palace-temple, the mystery was solved. Some of the tablets were in "Arwazan" which could not, at that time, be read, but others were in the familiar Babylonian cuneiform script deciphered by Rawlinson, the same type of writing found in the royal library at Nineveh. These tablets proved beyond any doubt that this was Hattusas, the capital of the Hittite empire, and from correspondence with Egypt found in these documents it was now positive that the "Kheta" were the Hittites. Among the documents were letters from an Egyptian queen, the widow of Tutankhamen (Tutankhamun), and a copy of the treaty of nonaggression between the Pharaoh Ramses II and the Hittite monarch Muwatallis, almost word for word as it appears at Karnak in Egypt. The documents were fascinating. Among them were chronicles describing how the early Hittite kings conquered Asia Minor and then began to push southward into Syria and beyond. One chronicle refers to a King Labarnas who lived about 1600 b.c. of whom it was written: lions
Formerly Labarnas was king; and then his sons, his brothers, his connexions by marriage and his blood-relations were united. And the land was small; but wherever he marched to battle, he subdued the lands of his enemies with his might. He destroyed the lands and made them powerless, and he made the seas his frontiers. And when he returned from battle, his sons went each to every part of the and the great cities of the land were assigned to them. land. .
.
.
212
Leonard
Cottrell
Another chronicle tells of a family quarrel in which the ailing King who had appointed his nephew as his successor, disowns him, much to the anger of the young man's mother. The king's nephew was Labarnas,
also
named Labarnas. Behold I have fallen sick. The young Labarnas I had proclaimed to you (saying) "he shall sit upon the throne"; I, the king, called him my son, embraced him, exalted him, and cared for him continually. But he showed himself a youth not fit to be seen; he shed no tears, he showed no pity, he was cold and heartless. I, the king, summoned him to my couch (and said) "Well, no one will (in future) bring up the child of his sister as his foster-son. The word of the king he has not laid to heart, but the word of his mother, that serpent, he has laid to heart. Enough! He is my son no more." Then his mother bellowed like an ox: "They have torn asunder the womb in my living body! They have ruined him, and you will kill him!" But have I, the king, done him any evil? Behold I have given my son Labarnas a house; I have given him [arable land] in plenty [sheep in] plenty I have given him. Let him now eat and drink. [So long as he is good] he may come up to the city; but if he come forward(?) [as then he shall not come up, but shall remain a trouble-maker], .
.
.
.
.
.
[in his house]. "^
clash with Egypt came when, in the thirteenth century B.C., Muwawith his allied armies drawn from many countries, threatened Egypt's empire in Syria-Palestine. The two armies met at Kadesh on the
The
tallis,
Orontes River, in a battle which Ramses
II
commemorated
vaingloriously
temple walls at Medinet Habu and at Abu Simbel, depicting himself as the hero of an Egyptian victory. In fact, it was an indecisive struggle in which neither side gained a permanent advantage. Afterwards both kings agreed to respect one another's territorial rights and
on
his
the treaty
was the
result.
Until comparatively recent times, the other form of writing, the so-
on the Hamath and Aleppo stelae and on the rocks of Anatolia, defied decipherment. This was because until 1947 no bilingual inscription had been found. But in that year a most remarkable discovery was made at a place called Karatepe— a true "lost city" set in remote and beautiful surroundings in what the ancients called Cilicia, about fifty miles north of the "corner" at which the southern called Hittite hieroglyphs carved
coast of Turkey, running east to west, joins the north to south line of
the Syrian coast. Here stood a
wooded
hill
called
by the
local inhabi-
"The Black Mound," and so thinly populated is the country that probably no one save an occasional charcoal-burner ever visited it. As Seton Lloyd writes in his book Early Anatolia (1956): tants
7 O. R. Gurney, The Hittites (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1952).
213
Archaeology Few,
in fact
could have suspected that, in times almost beyond the
horizon of historical memory, a king had chosen residence,
and
that,
it
as his place of
beneath the brambles and scrub-oak, the
symbols of his authority still lay buried among the ruins of his castle. Yet such was indeed the case. here, before the excavators' eyes, .
.
.
were carefully worded sentences which he had composed himself in two languages and crudely drawn images of a world in which he lived. Among these tumbled galleries of small stone pictures, his people were also to be seen, a graceless folk with sloping foreheads and receding chins, such as are known to have inhabited large areas of Anatolia at this time [about 800 B.C., a thousand years after the historical Hittites had established themselves in Anatolia].^
Yet the ancient hieroglyphic script had survived down to that time; on each side of the gate chambers was an identical inscription, one in Hithieroglyphs and the other in Phoenician, a known language. Although grammarians had already mastered the basic structure of this language, they could now grasp the meaning of individual words. As a tite
result
of this
discovery,
the Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions in Asia
Minor, and scattered throughout the
ning to speak.
It
museums
of the world, are begin-
appears that whereas the Hittites used the well-known
and familiar cuneiform for their official correspondence and records, they needed a more monumental script for their public monuments, as did the ancient Egyptians. Most of these inscriptions are short, and refer to kings and queens, gods and goddesses. The basis of the language is Hittite cuneiform, with two hundred signs, of which fifty-six are phonetic and the rest are ideograms; the syllables begin with a consonant and end with a vowel, but whereas the value of the consonants is fixed, the vowel-sounds are variable. This adds to the difficulties of the philologists, but at least there are vowel-sounds, none of which exist in the ancient Egyptian script. Certain syntactical devices also occur, for the proper rendering of the grammatical structure of a sentence. It would appear that after the seventh century B.C. the Hittite hieroglyphic system passed out of use. In any case, the inhabitants of Karatepe were not true Hittites in the older sense, though they had inherited the language and script. According to the inscriptions, they called themselves the Danuna, who could possibly be the Dananians, a tribe listed by Ramses III as a member of the alliance of "Sea Peoples" who
invaded his kingdom in the twelfth century be identified with Homer's "Danaoi," though
B.C.
this
They may also possibly by no means a certain
is
identification.
One cannot leave Turkey without a brief mention which has more archaeological implications than any
of (Jatal Hiiyiik, Hittite site.
8 Seton Lloyd, Early Anatolia (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1956).
214
The
Leonard
Cottrell
Bronze Age culture which goes back 2000 B.C. Catal Hiiyiik, discovered in 1961, excavations having continued for five years, is practically unique; a large palace with shrines adorned with vividly painted frescoes, and of elaborate construction, dating from before 6000 b.c. DiscovHittites
no
belonged
in the
main
to a
earlier than 1800 b.c, or at the earliest
ered by James Mellaart, it is a true city, built of walls of unhewn stone (bronze cutting tools not having been invented), and the walls are
adorned with
lively painted
hunting pictures
frescoes,
in a lively style,
depicting,
among
other scenes,
with figures of animals, notably red
pursued with arrows by conventionally drawn huntsmen. These drawings belong to a period before men had begun to grow food crops in abundance, and are reminiscent of the cave-paintings at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. In some of the paintings the male figures, mostly bearded and wearing loincloths and leopard skin, appear to be bulls,
teasing the animals (as in the
them
in earnest.
of fun
They
Minoan
bull-sport) rather than hunting
are depicted, says Mellaart, "with a lively sense
and character."
fatal Hiiyiik
because
it
is
one of the most significant
sites in
the world,
if
only
proves that even in Neolithic times, long before the discovery
more thousand years before the first cities were Egypt and Mesopotamia, some Stone Age men lived a civic existence and built elaborate temples and palaces. Not all lived by scratching a mere existence with stone tools and in reed huts beside some oasis or river. One looks forward to more news from fatal Hiiyiik and of metals, three or
founded
in
perhaps the discovery of other Neolithic settlements of comparable sophistication.
The
ancestry of urban
have been led
life
may
go back
much
further in time than
we
to think, fatal Hiiyiik also illustrates the early develop-
ment
of religion. It is certainly not the earliest manifestation, since the impulse goes far back in time, even to the primitive cave dwellers of twenty thousand years ago who painted magical scenes of hunting rites on their walls (e.g., at Altamira
and Lascaux), but
at Catal Hiiyiik Mellaart
found what must be the oldest huilt temple so far discovered. In one chamber were remains which enable us to reconstruct a ritual in which a robed priestess reverently places a human skull, in a basket, in front of a huge figure of a bull's head, painted and incorporating horns projecting from a plastered wall.'-^ "The funerary buildings and fittings," writes Mellaart in his comment on the site, "are all accounted for in the excavation. Rarely has so little been left to the imagination in an archaeological reconstruction of such a remote period."
9 See
illustration
by Alan
Scott, Illustrated
215
London News, May
9,
1964, pp. 728-29.
Archaeology
GREECE
The years
some three to four thousand and one wonders if it was transported there by invaders or immigrants from Asia Minor, which is the natural land-bridge between Asia and Europe. But before we consider Crete and all it implies as the site of the oldest civilization in Europe, it may be as well to consider the steps which led to this discovery which is continuing to astonish us by cult of the bull occurs in Crete later,
fresh revelations.
Throughout the nineteenth century in Europe curiosity about the remote past was increasing. On the one hand, there were the discoveries of Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) man, in France, Spain, and elsewhere— remains going back twenty thousand years and more. On the other hand, the civilized history of the continent seemed to be tied irrevocably to literary evidence. Apart from uncovering Etruscan remains in Italy, archaeologists were content to examine sites and cities associated with the writings of Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pausanias, Pliny, and other
Greek or Roman observers. Archaeology was
still
the
handmaid
of
lit-
erary history, and in Egypt and the Middle East the decipherment of the Egyptian
and Babylonian writing systems, while
it
helped to
inter-
pret the physical remains, only reinforced the archaeologists' dependence
on written records. In a sense the triumphs of Champollion, Georg Grotefend, Rawlinson, and others in the field of linguistics arrested the development of pure archaeology, which relies for its evidence solely on physical remains without any literary context. In Greece, for instance, where the surviving monuments of the "classical" period were often inscribed, and could be accurately related to written history, no one seriously considered that Greek history extended any further back than the date of the first recorded Olympic Games, in the eighth century
B.C.
Before that time, the stories recorded in the
works of Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, etc., of the "Seven against Thebes," of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Menelaus and Helen, Orestes, Iphigenia, Oedipus, and the rest, were regarded as purely mythical. Even the Trojan War, despite its careful description by Homer, was placed in the same category. In 1846 the historian George Grote could express this opinion, which
was generally accepted
at the time:
first recorded Olym776 B.C. For the truth is that historical records properly so-called do not begin until after that date. Nor will any man, who candidly considers the extreme paucity of attested facts for two centuries after 776 b.c, be astonished to learn that the state of Greece in 900, 1,000, 1,100, 1,200, 1,300, 1,400 e.g. etc., cannot be described to him with anything like decent evidence I
begin the real history of Greece with the
piad, or
.
.
.
.
216
.
.
.
.
.
Relics
from Mycenae
THE GOLDEN
CUP OF NESTOR
THE GOLD FUNERARY MASK, FROM THE MYCENAEAN GRAVE SHAFTS, WHICH IS NAMED FOR AGAMEMNON
THE BRONZE STATUE OF POSEIDON
Nestor's cup and Agamemnon's mask were found in the royal graves of Mycenae by Schliemann and those who followed him. They have since been dated approximately 1500 b.c, 800 years before George Grote's "be-
or nearly
ginning of recorded time."
The
times which
I
thus set apart from the region of history are dis-
cernible only through a different
To confound
legend.
atmosphere— that
of poetry
together these disparate matters
is,
in
and
my
judgement, essentially unphilosophical.
That well-known passage was published more than twenty years after had reopened the scroll of ancient Egyptian history, and more than twenty years after Rawlinson, Grotefend, and others had begun to rediscover the world of Assyria, Babylon, and Sumeria. In Egypt and Western Asia, a prospect had opened which extended back to the second millennium B.C., and future researches would carry the story back for another thousand years at least. Yet to Grote it seemed inconceivable that Greece— the birthplace of western civilization— could have had a history of comparable the partial decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs
antiquity. It is
man whose researches eventually demolished and opened a new and unfinished chapter in Greek archae-
paradoxical that the
Grote's belief
217
Archaeology ology was himself a
literalist, in that he beheved in the Hteral truth of Homer's poems. Heinrich SchHemann, born in 1822, was a self-made businessman with little formal education, who did not become an excavator until late in life. Although professional scholars tended to scofiF at him, Schliemann— unimpressed by or unaware of what Grote had written—was naive enough to take the Greek myths literally. Homer had written about "windy Troy," of Argos "home of lovely women," and Mycenae "rich in gold." The Greeks of classical times had believed in
the truth of these stories, but the classical scholars of the early nineteenth
century regarded them, as Grote did, as fairy
and
his
young Greek wife dug the
seven superimposed
And when,
cities,
site of
tales.
Yet
when Schliemann
Troy, he found the remains of
one of which he decided was Priam's Troy.
near the lowest level of the mound, he discovered treasure
of gold, silver,
and bronze, he pronounced
leader of the Trojans against the Greeks.
this to
Some
be that of King Priam, of the golden diadems,
Schliemann suggested, could have belonged to Helen. Moving to Greece, he dug at Mycenae, just within the Lion Gate where the Greek travel writer Pausanias, in the second century a.d., claimed to have seen the tombs of Agamemnon and his followers. He unearthed seven shaft graves, containing bodies of men and women bedecked with gold and surrounded by rich funerary equipment. Unlike Petrie, Schliemann was a treasure-seeker, and he relied implicitly on written tradition. He was not a scientific, careful excavator and destroyed
much
archaeological evidence in his
eflForts
to
find
valuable objects.
Nonetheless, he shook the skepticism of classical scholars because some of the things
he discovered, such as the "boar's tusk helmet," the "cup of
Nestor" with figures of feeding doves, and representations of the great body-shields carried by some of the Homeric heroes, were very
much
had described them. Schliemann was confident earthed the tombs of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and
had un-
the poet
that he
as
their followers.
Later, at Tiryns, he excavated another palace associated with Heracles
Greek myth. And though his assistant, Wilhelm Dorpfeld, a younger man, induced him to use more accurate, painstaking methods, relying as Petrie did on the study and recording of commonplace objects, the mighty lines of Homer still sang in his brain, and he remained more or less convinced to the end of his life that the remains he had unearthed must belong to the period of the Trojan War, which was usually reckoned at about 1190 b.c. In this he was supported by a number of classicists including Gladstone, the British prime minister. In fact, Gladstone wrote a preface to Schliemann's book Ilios (1881). The close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth were distinguished by what many consider the greatest single discovery made in Europe. It was also the most romantic, since, like Schliemann's excavations at Troy and Mycenae, it proved that there was a kernel of in
218
Leonard
Cottrell
which classical historians such as Grote had dismissed mere legends. This was the discovery by Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Evans of remains of a high civilization which had flourished on the island of Crete, a civilization the roots of which went down to below 3000 B.C. and which, between about 2500 and 1400 b.c, was equal to those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia; in some ways it was superior. Moreover, like those civilizations, it was literate. In fact, it was Evans' belief that the civilization Schliemann had first discovered on the Greek mainland and had called "Mycenaean" (after the type-site where these artifacts were first found) must have had a writing system, that led him to Grete. By the end of the nineteenth century, many more Mycenaean sites had been unearthed in Greece, and their characteristic pottery and other manufactured products had been discovered over a wide area, including Egypt, Western Asia, and the Greek islands. Some historians preferred to call this the "Aegean" civilization. Evans resembled Schliemann only in the fact that both were rich men, but whereas the German archaeologist was a businessman who turned to archaeology late in life, Evans was a scholar from a family of scholars. After Harrow and Oxford, he became for a time an eflFective war correspondent in the Balkans, where he sided vigorously with the insurgents, and later became curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a post which gave him ample opportunities for travel and truth in the stories
as
research.
He was a keen numismatist, with almost microscopic eyesight, although he was short-sighted. His ability to recognize the most minute details of and his acute sense of artistic style, especially in objects of anwere tremendous assets. He examined the objects which Schliemann had found at Troy and Mycenae but believed, on stylistic grounds alone, that these could be much older than the traditional date of the Trojan War. He was fascinated by Mycenaean art and argued that so highly developed a civilization, with well-organized and wide trading connections, could hardly have been without a writing system. The first evidence that led him to a firm conclusion was found on certain tiny "bead-seals" that he discovered on the tray of an antiquity-dealer in coins,
tiquity,
Athens.
Evans thought that he could detect, on these very small objects, tiny marks which might represent some form of writing. On learning that the seals came from Grete, he went there with his friend John Myres, and during their exploration of the remotest parts of this lovely mountainous island found many more examples. Though less of a romantic than Schliemann, Evans felt the powerful lure of Crete, home of Minos, scene of the Theseus-Ariadne legend— described, among others, by Plutarch—birthplace of Zeus, king of the Gods, and familiar to Homer, who
had
written:
219
A
MAX ONCE MADE
HIS
MARK BY THE
DESIGN HE
PRESSED INTO
WET CLAY
SEAL-STONE DESU.NEHS PROGRESSED TO GEOMETRIC FORMS. THE SIDE VIEW OF THE STONE (lEFt) SHOWS THE HOLE BY WHICH THE STONE WAS HUNG ABOUT A MANS NECK
FROM GEOMETRIC SHAPES, THE BEAD-STONES PROGRESSED TO REPRESENTATIONS OF LIVING THINGS. THIS CYLINDER SEAL SHOWS AN ELEPHANT, A RHINOCEROS, AND A CROCODILE. THE PICTURE IS MADE BY ROLLING THE SEAL (lEFT) IN WET CLAY
MYTH BECAME INTE* GRATED INTO THE ART OF THE SEALS. SUN GOD SHAMASH HOLDS THE N SAW WHICH CUTS DE^ CISIONS. BEFORE HIM A WORSHIPPER OFFERS A >
SACRIFICIAL KID. ISHTAR, IN THE GUISE OF
WAR-GODDESS, !^
STANDS
WITH ONE FOOT ON A LION, HOLDING A
MACE
AND A SWORD
FINALLY, THE SEALS ROHK 1111, wi Uil.il.s NAMl IN Illls ASi; Hi: WAS Ll(.AL-l.AM THE SCRIBE." THE HEROES CilLGAMESH AND ENKIDU ARE SHOWN FKiHTINC; A BULL AND A LION ,
(
Leonard There
Cottrell
a fair and fniitful island in mid-ocean called Crete;
is
town
there,
it
is
There is a great and there are ninety cities in it: Cnossus, where Minos reigned who every nine years had
thickly peopled
.
.
.
a conference with Jove himself.^"
And Thucydides had .
a
.
.
the
navy
first
is
person
Minos.
also written about
known
He made
to us
by
King Minos:
tradition as having established
himself master of what
now
is
called the
Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent the
first
colonies, expelling the Carians
and appointing
sons governors; and thus did his best to put
down
waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his
The
his
own
piracy in those
own
use.^^
how
Evans, with other archaeologists such as the Italian Americans Harriet Boyd and Richard Seager, and the French at Mallia, revealed a great civilization even older than Mycenae is well-known. Here it is only necessary to recall the principal events in order to provide a background to the extraordinary advances in preHellenic archaeology that have been made in recent years. Evans dug at Knossos, in a huge mound that had already attracted the attention of a local amateur (appropriately named Minos) who had unearthed a number of giant pithoi— pottery storage-jars. Within weeks Evans found what he had hoped to find, large numbers of clay tablets inscribed with an story of
F. Halbherr, the
unknown
writing system, part of the palace archives.
He was
not able
though he recognized that they were lists, and that two languages were involved using the same basic characters. He called these "Linear A" and "Linear B." But as he extended his excavations at Knossos, his discovery of Europe's oldest writing system became only one of a bewildering and exciting series of revelations. The mound proved to contain a palace of enormous size and complexity. Evans, who had the resources, the skill, and the patience needed for the task, set about excavating this building, using the stratigraphic method and keeping careful records. He made mistakes and was perhaps a little over-zealous in some of his restorations. But unlike Petrie, he wished not only to extract every available piece of information from the site but also to preserve and restore it as far as was possible, and this involved a monumental eflFort and great expense. He devoted thirty years of his life to the work and is believed to have spent about £250,000 of his personal fortune. Rapidly following his lead, archaeologists of several nations— Italian, French, American, Greek— excavated other Cretan sites at Mallia, Phaistos, Azia, Triada, Gournia, and elsewhere. From their researches, and to decipher these,
10 The Odyssey XIX. 170; The Pelopotmesian War
11
GBWW, Vol. 4, pp. 4; GBWW, Vol. I.
221
290d-291a. 6, p.
350a.
PART OF THE WEST MAGAZINES OF THE EXCAVATED PALACE OF KNOSSOS
more recent successors, a civihzation was revealed which Evans called "Minoan" after King Minos. At first he believed that the objects he was finding were Mycenaean because there were strong similarities. But as he gradually dug deeper and deeper into the great mound of Kephala, the site of ancient Knossos, he found indisputable evidence that a high culture had existed in Crete more than a thousand years those of their
before 1500 as
now
b.c— the approximate date
established.
of the
Mycenaean
shaft graves
In fact, the islanders, whose ancestors probably
came from western Asia more than to establish their civilization in
begun roughly the same time
four thousand years b.c, had
about 3000
b.c. at
Egypt was first united under the founding Pharaohs of the First Dynasty. The resemblance between Minoan and Mycenaean culture, in pottery, tools and weapons, architecture, dress, ornament, and art appeared to be due to the Mycenaeans, a warrior caste with a rudimentary culture, copying and adapting the achievements of the older civilization. The first European civilization had been traced back to its Cretan as
222
THE RESTORED THRONE ROOM OF THE PALACE OF MINOS AT KNOSSOS
CRETAN BATHROOM OF THE QUEENS MEGAROn" at KNOSSOS
THIS
IS ENGRAVED WITH A DESIGN OF FIGHTING BULLS
MINOAN DAGGER-BLADE
THIS BEAUTIFUL OCTOPUS VASE WAS MADE BY AN EARLY CRETAN. HE MAY HAVE BEEN INFLUENCED BY THE SNAKE CULT ^\T^ICH EXISTED THEN
Archaeology homeland.
Its isolation,
sea," preserved
surrounded, as
Homer
says,
by the "deep, dark
from in\asion and spoliation. Nearly
all this valuable information was obtained, not by consulting written records, which were sparse and inaccurate, but by a scrupulous examination of Cretan arti-
facts.
it
For Evans never succeeded
deciphering "Linear A" or "Linear
in
B," though he recognized that the tablets
The Minoans had
presence of datable Egyptian objects, of Pharaohs, enabled
Evans
e.g.,
statuettes bearing the
names
to establish reasonably firm dates for the
levels at w^hich these foreign objects
draw up
were inventories of some kind.
trade and cultural connections with Egypt, and the
were found. In
fact,
he was able to
a chronology of comparative development based on these ob-
known writing system, were all he had to work Egypt datable tomb-paintings and inscriptions were found depicting men wearing the Cretan costume shown on the wall-frescoes
jects,
which, lacking a
with.
And
at
in
Knossos.
Yet Minoan culture
owed very
There are few resemblances between Cretan and Egyptian art; the Minoans worshiped different gods from those of Egypt, the principal deity being a MotherGoddess or Snake-Goddess whose effigy was found on miniature seals and in shrines. Moreover, whereas the ancient Egyptians delighted in engraving their temples with written inscriptions, the Minoans did not. Even their tombs were uninscribed, and the mysterious "Linear B," which Evans unavailingly strove to decipher, appeared to be confined to the little
to Egypt.
clerkly productions of the office storekeepers.
There was much academic discussion and argument, sometimes bitter and violent. For instance, for a long time Evans appears to have believed that the Minoans colonized the mainland, and that such sites as Mycenae and Tiryns were offshoots of Cretan culture. His principal opponent. Professor Alan Wace, contested this and averred that the Mycenaean states were always independent, although they imitated Minoan art and may have employed Cretan craftsmen to make their tools and weapons. Evans depended partly on the legend of King Minos and Prince Theseus of Athens, whose story is told by Plutarch^- and others. According to this story, Athens was once a tributary state of Crete and had to send a yearly tribute of youths and maidens to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, the Bull-monster— progeny of Queen Pasiphae and a bull— whom Minos kept in a Labyrinth beneath the palace. Support for this belief was provided by certain wall-frescoes at Knossos showing young male and female athletes somersaulting over the back of a charging bull. Also, the Cretan name for the Double Axe, a religious emblem sacred to the Mother-Goddess, was labrys, which suggests that this is how the word Labyrinth originated.
12
The
Lives-
GBWW,
Vol. 14, pp.
1
fl.
224
Leonard
Cottrell
Eventually Wace proved his theory to the satisfaction of most scholars, though Evans remained unconvinced to the end of his long life. Wace also argued that the language spoken by the Mycenaeans was an archaic form of Greek and that this would eventually be proved when the tablets were deciphered. This turned out to be a true prophecy when a young British architect named Michael Ventris, who had spent some seventeen years at decipherment, succeeded in 1953 and announced that in his opinion "Linear B" was a primitive form of Greek. To date "Linear A" has not been deciphered. Ventris' system was an almost mathematical analysis of the various signs in the script which he set out in a "grid system," trying to establish possible consistencies in grammar which might afford a clue to the construction of the unknown language. Possibly a computer, programmed with this material, might have produced a result quicker than Ventris did. If such methods had been available to Ventris, I am sure he would have used them. But could any mechanical device have combined Ventris' mathematical ingenuity, historical imagination, and intuitive feeling for the civilizations of Mycenae and Crete? I doubt it.
When
Professor Carl Blegen, of the University of Cincinnati, excavated
the splendid palace of Nestor at Pylos in the Peloponnese he discovered a rich collection of "Linear B" tablets dating from about
roughly the time
when
the mainland
Mycenaean
centers
1200
B.C.,
were being de-
stroyed by the invading Dorians, the precursors of the "classical" Greeks.
Examined and
classified
by Emmett
L. Bennett,
Jr.,
these tablets pro-
vided Ventris with additional material which enabled him to check his
decipherment based on the tablets that Evans had found at Knossos. Throughout the learned world, in America, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia, scholars had been wrestling with "Linear B" for more than fifty years. Yet nearly all laid down their pens and saluted the young Englishman when, in 1953, very modestly, he announced in a BBC talk that he believed the language to be an archaic form of Greek, and Homeric Greek at that. At first, he hardly dared to believe that he had "cracked" the script, without the aid of a bilingual clue such as had aided Champollion in Egypt and Rawlinson in Mesopotamia. original
After exhaustive analysis and criticism, most scholars
now
now
agree with
by the some three thousand years ago was akin to the tongue Homer. Wace's theory that the Mycenaeans were a Greek-speaking
Ventris. It
is
generally accepted that the language written
scribes of Knossos
of
people has been vindicated. In recent years, other examples of "Linear B" have turned up on the mainland, at Mycenae itself, for instance, but only
No examples of "Linear A" have been found except in Crete, and some scholars believe that "Linear A" was the language spoken by the Minoans, whereas, when the Mycenaeans, as is now believed, conquered and occupied Crete and took over the Minoan empire, they used
"Linear B."
225
Archaeology
Minoan writing system to write in their own language. The tablets, as Evans had suspected, turned out to be mere inventories; scholars who had hoped to find "Linear B" transcriptions of the Greek the
myths, and descriptions of Greek history in preclassical times, were disappointed. The kings and queens of Mycenae and Crete remain silent to
we have, at the present time, are numerous lists of arms and equipment, chariots, swords, women, slaves; accounts of land allocations to kings and to the temples of deities; references to military and naval this day. All
dispositions at Pylos at the time
when
the city
was threatened by the
invading Dorians; and a number of Greek proper names, some of which include gods and goddesses familiar from classical times. But to find the
name
it
is
odd
Hector, for instance, applied to a mere servant.
In Egypt, the Pharaohs boast at length about their achievements. So do the Assyrians in their inscriptions found at Nineveh and elsewhere. The Hittites of AnatoHa have left us chronicles, diplomatic correspondence, poetry, and religious and secular literature of considerable power. But the Mycenaeans and the Minoans keep silence. Only in Homer do
we
hear faint echoes of that long- vanished world.
archaeology can the
weapons and
made and
tell
us
much about
the
economy
And of a
although modern Mycenaean state,
tools they used, the crops they raised, the
exported,
we know
goods they
hardly any more than Chaucer, Dante,
and Shakespeare did concerning what they thought and felt. However, there have been important developments in the field of Greek philology. We have seen how Schliemann and others were impressed by the apparent resemblances between the heroic world described by Homer and the objects found in the Mycenaean shaft graves— the boar's tusk helmet, the great body-shield covering the warrior from neck to ankle (which is also found represented in Crete), the Homeric megaron or hall with its pillared porch, and so on. The difficulty is that Homer, if he existed, lived in the ninth or eighth century b.c, long after the glories of Mycenaean civilization had vanished; when warriors no longer fought in chariots and carried large body-shields as described by the poet; when the dead were cremated, not interred in richly furnished tombs such as Schliemann found; when weapons were of iron, not bronze. How, then, could the Ionian poet and his successors have known about
One
this
vanished world?
problem which is gaining increasing support is by Denys Page, notably in his book History and the Homeric Iliad (1955). Briefly, the theory is that the Homeric bards and their successors had inherited a mass of oral literature passed on from generation to generation, which preserved, in certain formulaic phrases, memories of a world that had once existed, but that Homer himself had never seen. Over many centuries, descriptions of arming, fighting, sailing ships, fashioning weapons, etc., had been reduced to a standard convensolution to this
that put forward
226
Leonard tionalized form that
generations of bards.
Cottrell
was passed on unchanged,
When,
in
by Homeric
or Httle changed,
the eighth century
B.C.,
the
poems were first written down, these formulaic phrases were retained and subsequently repeated, with little or no alteration, despite the fact which they are the
that the world of
reflection ceased to exist
Dorians entered Greece between 1200 and 1100 archaeology" in which the linguist
B.C.
This
is
when
the
a kind of
concerned not with buried objects but with archaic patterns of thought and behavior. But one must admit that not all archaeologists or linguists take this view. One of the difficulties is the discrepancy between the world revealed by Homer, which was a relatively simple society, and the world of the "Linear B" "literary
is
which suggests a highly bureaucratic society similar to those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, in which a multitude of scribes and officials administered the economy, levying taxes, making allocations of land, and keeping precise records. There is nothing remotely heroic about the tablets, and it has been pointed out, notably by J. H. Finley, that the Mycenaean world which they partially illustrate is not at all like that described by Homer. Finley, therefore, suggests that "Homer's world" probably dates from an intermediate period between the fall of the Mycenaean states and the flowering of Greek "classical" culture. And yet there remain, obstinately, the objects which Schliemann found at Mycenae which are now known definitely to date from about 1500 B.C.; and Carl Blegen, who conducted the most recent reexamination of Troy in the thirties and fifties, has demonstrated, to most people's satisfaction, that Priam's Troy was destroyed in about 1250 b.c, not in the latter part of the twelfth century b.c. as had formerly been believed. Incidentally, Blegen also established that the oldest part of Troy dates from the Neolithic period, before 3000 b.c, and that the so-called Treasure of Priam, which Schliemann found in one of the lowest of the superimposed cities, dates from the Early Bronze Age, at least one thousand years before the Trojan War. On the whole, I find Page's theory more convincing, and so do many others. Blegen's excavation of Pylos ranks among the most exciting ever contablets,
ducted in Greece. Pylos that garrulous old
seus
how much
is
associated in
man who was
better wars
Homer with the "sage Nestor," Agamemnon and Odys-
always telling
were fought
in the
good old days.
On
this
elevated position, near the coast of the western Peloponnese, Blegen
excavated the remains of two Mycenaean palaces, the larger of which better preserved than Mycenae, though a
site.
But
it
it
does not
command
is
so glorious
includes the full ground plan of the megaron with annex,
porch, and great
hall, in
which the
circular hearth
still
stands intact, and
even the pedestal for the throne on which the king sat. Not far a well-preserved bathroom with bath, of the type in which Telemachus, son of Odysseus, was bathed by Nestor's daughter, as dethere
away
is
is
227
Archaeology scribed in the Odyssey.
And
it
was
in the archives of this palace that
Blegen found the rich store of "Linear B" tablets which enabled Ventris to complete his historic decipherment. The late John Papademetriou, who died from a heart attack brought on by over-exertion in the cause of archaeology, had a notable triumph at Brauron in Attica, where he unearthed the long-lost temple of Artemis and the sacred spring beneath the mud in mentioned by Euripides, which he found thousands of delicate feminine ornaments— bronze mirrors, gold and bronze brooches, etc.— cast into the water by women who had come to Brauron to make oflFerings to the goddess. Flooding had preserved these things of beauty and high antiquity. At Mycenae in 1951, Papademetriou and other Greek archaeologists, including G. E. Mylonas, unearthed a second Mycenaean grave-circle containing shaft graves, even older than the one which Schliemann had discovered seventy-five years earlier. Many of the tombs were intact, and contained gold facemasks, rich jewelry, and arms in gold, silver, and bronze. They are now on view in the Archaeological Museum in Athens. Also in the display there is another remarkable find, this time from the classical period, which owes its preservation partly to Papademetriou. A few years ago, workmen widening a road in the Piraeus, the port of Athens, came upon a bronze rod sticking out of the earth. The foreman informed the Greek Antiquities Service, of which Papademetriou was then head, and a team of archaeologists under his direction took over the excavation. The bronze rod turned out to be part of a Greek statue ^'^
of the fifth century b.c.
Near
it,
perfectly preserved, lay three other
bronze statues, all products of the finest period of classical Greek art. These had evidently reposed in a Roman warehouse near the port, preparatory to being shipped to Rome. But for some fortunate reason they never left Greece. One wonders if other works of art, perhaps an
unknown
Phidias or Praxiteles,
still
beneath the earth or the
lie
sea,
awaiting discovery.
Thanks
from
to the eflForts of archaeologists
ing Greeks,
more and more
all
over the world, includ-
treasures are being retrieved from the soil of
For unlike Egypt, where with a few exceptions excavation is mainly conducted by Egyptian nationals, Greece has always thrown her arms wide open to scholars of other countries— the Germans at Olympia, the French at Delphi, the British at Knossos, and the Americans at a number of sites. One of the most remarkable feats of reconstruction has been the stoa or gallery of Attains, overlooking the ancient Greece and
its
islands.
agora of Athens, a two-story building restored by the patient
American
scholars.
Thanks
at least part of the agora as
13 Iphigcnia
Among
to this restoration, it
was
the Tauri 1463;
in the
GBWW, 228
it
is
now
second century
Vol. 5, p. 424a.
eflForts
of
possible to see b.c.
Leonard In Crete there has been
much
Cottrell
activity
and not a
Httle controversy.
The distinguished philologist Leonard Palmer of Oxford aroused some argument when he contested Evans' belief that the Cretan palace of Knossos finally fell in about 1400 B.C., after which date Minoan civilization ceased to exist. Palmer, ject
is
tablets
who
holds a minority view so far as this sub-
concerned, suggests that Evans was mistaken in his dating of the
found
at Knossos,
approximately the time
and that these could date from nearer 1200
when
Pylos
fell to
the Dorians.
He
b.c,
believes that
the Pylian and Knossian tablets are practically contemporary. Supposing
become merely the home but continued to be occupied by kings down to the end of the second millennium b.c. In this case, arguing on literary evidence alone. King Idomeneus of Crete, who led Palmer's theory to be correct, Knossos did not of "squatters" (Evans'
word)
after 1400 b.c.
a contingent of soldiers to support a
monarch
a city that
Agamemnon
in the
Trojan War, was
of some importance and not a mere minor ruler governing had long ceased to embody the power and wealth of Minoan
civilization.
However, although Palmer's theory, well argued in his book Mycenaeans and Minoans (1961), has been widely publicized in the lay press, it has very few supporters among professional archaeologists. On purely linguistic grounds. Palmer's theory
would explain the
is
a tempting one, since
it
and those found at Knossos appear very similar, despite Evans' dating which would separate them by about two hundred years. But John Boardman, who was for a time Palmer's collaborator, has found no archaeological evidence which substantially shakes Evans' dating, and his view, that the Knossian tablets date from about 1400 B.C., and not 1200 b.c, is accepted by the majority of archaeologists specializing in Greek prehistory. In Crete and the Aegean generally, important discoveries have been made during the past decade or two. Recently a fourth Minoan palace has been discovered at Zakro in Crete which has yielded rich finds. Even more fascinating is the theory, recently revived, that Crete was the lost fact that the Pylos tablets
continent of Atlantis. Plato
Timaeus and a fragment
tells
the story in one of his Dialogues, the
of the Critias,^^ of
how
there once existed, far
out in the Atlantic, a vast continent, as large as Asia and Africa united,
where
under the aegis of the god Poseidon. It had splenstone, a fine harbor, and its ships ranged far and wide. One of its sports was the hunting of wild bulls. Seeking to control the world, it came into conflict with Athens but was defeated by that city more than nine thousand years before the time of Plato. The story, which, according to Plato, was told to the lawgiver Solon by Egyptian priests when he visited Egypt, goes on to describe how Atlantis sank justice reigned
did buildings of
14 Timaeus 25;
hewn
GBWW,
Vol. 7, p. 446a. Critias; pp. 478
229
ff.
Archaeology beneath the sea
in a
day and a
night,
and how an Athenian army was
destroyed.
This could be a mere fable and probably island called Santorin, formerly
is.
But there
named Thera, which
miles from Crete and which literally "blew
its
is
a volcanic
about seventy top" about 1500 b.c. Geololies
have calculated that the volcanic force that caused the central part of the island to explode was several times greater than that which destroyed Krakatoa in the eighties of the last century. In the latter erupgists
cloud of volcanic ash was so great that
it orbited the world for waves one hundred feet high, de\astating the coasts of Ja\ a and Sumatra, sweeping away trains and railroad tracks, and hurling a large steamer several miles inland. The tidal waves caused by the eruption of Thera must have been even greater, and could account for the sudden destruction of the Cretan coastal sites and the end of
tion, the
several years.
Minoan
It
caused
tidal
civilization.
But that is only one part of the story. If it could be proved that Thera was once part of the Minoan empire, belief in the association of Crete with Atlantis would be strengthened. Proof was recently provided when Spyridon Marinatos, now head of the Greek Antiquities Service, identified a Minoan palace on Santorin (that is, on what is left of it) buried under volcanic ash. One theory recently promulgated is that Crete and Thera were both part of the Minoan empire, that the sudden destruction of Thera may be reflected in the Atlantis story, and that although Crete itself was not destroyed, the effect of the catastrophe, in the form of tidal waves, clouds of volcanic ash, and earth tremors, could account for the sudden ending of Minoan civilization. The Mycenaeans, profiting from this, could have moved in and taken over the island some time later. Those, like Angelos Galanopoulos, a geologist, who agree with the identification of Crete with Atlantis, have put forward some ingenious arguments in support of their belief. For instance, there is the difficulty of equating the certainly mythical date, nine thousand years before Solon, with the geologically established fact that Thera erupted at some time between 1550 and 1400 b.c. Solon, poet and statesman, first achieves prominence in about 612 b.c. Taking the year 600 b.c. as our rough guideline, the destruction of Thera would have occurred about nine hundred, not nine thousand, years before his time. He got the stor\- from the Egyptian priests, who could well have heard of the destruction of this once great civilization of Minoan Crete. Could the priests, or Solon, have made a mistake in their calculations and, in effect, dropped a nought? Galanopoulos thinks so. Applying the same criterion of measurement, Atlantis might be made to appear ten times larger than it was. Therefore, since no such island continent could possibly be accommodated in the Aegean, and since in Solon's time Crete was well known and not in the least mysterious, the belief may have grown up that the "lost continent"
230
Leonard
had been
Cottrell
far out in the Atlantic, into
which few Greek navigators had
ever ventured, and was as big as Africa and Asia combined. Personally, It
I
share Marinatos' skepticism regarding the Atlantis myth.
seems more than probable that Plato invented the story to
illustrate
a point of philosophy. But there can be no possible doubt that Thera (or
Santorin) did erupt in the fifteenth century b.c. or thereabouts, that the still be seen— since Santorin is now a mere narrow islands surrounding a deep submarine crater— and that they would certainly be felt in Crete in the form of tidal waves, showers of volcanic ash, earth tremors, etc. Therefore, it seems highly likely that it was this, and not armed invasion, which brought the Minoan civilization to an end. It also seems more than probable that at some later date Mycenaean invaders from the mainland exploited the situation by occupying at least part of the island and ruHng from Knossos. They would have brought with them their Greek language and adapted the Minoan
eflFects
of this eruption can
circle of
writing system (Linear A) to write
Returning to the mainland,
been made
it.
we must mention
other important discov-
Lerna and Dendra, where Mycenaean tholos (beehive-shaped) tombs have recently been found, some intact or partially intact, containing grave-goods which gave further proof of the richness of Mycenaean civilization. There have also been important discoveries at Gla in Boeotia, at Volos in Thessaly (ancient lolkos from which the "Argo" sailed), and elsewhere, which throw light on the obscure fall of the Mycenaean civilization between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the eleventh century b.c. Marks of fire and destruction at lolkos, Pylos, Gla, and Thessaly support the ancient belief that the Mycenaean civilization was destroyed by newcomers whom one is tempted to equate with the Dorians, the ancestors eries
that have
there,
e.g.,
at
of the "classical" Greeks.
An odd
exception to this general rule was noted by Papademetriou
Mycenaean
Brauron in Attica. Here, and here alone, been no conquest, no evidence of sacking and burning. Occupation— judging from pottery and other artifacts— appears to have ceased peacefully in about 1300 b.c. This, Papademetriou suggested, might confirm the tradition that the hero Theseus, who may have been a Mycenaean king, persuaded the inhabitants of a number of cities voluntarily to abandon them and found a new capital at Athens. This is slender evidence on which to base a final judgment, but the work of Schliemann at Mycenae and Evans at Knossos has pro\ided such convincing proof of what used to be regarded as legend that it would be unwise to dismiss Papademetriou's theory out of hand. In this essay, I have deliberately stressed Mycenaean-Minoan archaeology because it is in this field that, for me at any rate, the contribution of the pure archaeologist has the greatest value. Not because the Myat the
citadel near
there seems to have
231
Archaeology cenaean world
is
but because the
necessarily
latter
more important than
that of classical times,
has the advantage of reliable documentation.
now becoming more and more
widely accepted that the ancestors of the Mycenaeans in Greece were of Asiatic origin, as is suggested by the legends preserved in classical times. Here again, myth, history, and archaeology seem to mingle. We read that Cadmus, founder of Thebes in Greece, came from Egypt. Europa, who gave her name to the EuroIt is
pean continent, was a daughter of Agenor, king of Tyre in Phoenicia. Zeus appeared to her in the form of a bull and carried her off to Crete, where she bore him a son called Minos. Archaeologists such as Evans have pointed out resemblances between the artifacts of Crete and those of western Asia. In Homer's Odyssey,^^' Menelaus, having recovered Helen after the sack of Troy, takes her to Egypt and brings back rich furnishings for his palace which he displays to Telemachus. And some scholars, e.g., Marinatos, strongly suggest that the gold in the Mycenaean shaft graves came from Egypt, and that the Mycenaeans may have even borrowed their burial customs from those of the Pharaohs. This theory, however,
What
is
not uni\ersally accepted.
does seem reasonably certain
is
that the old-fashioned concept
of the "bronze-clad Achaeans" as blonde invaders from northern is
no longer
valid.
The weight
Europe an
of archaeological evidence suggests
Asiatic origin not only for the indigenous inhabitants of Greece but also
Mycenaeans and the Minoans themselves. In this case perhaps the clue to the decipherment of "Linear A" may come from western Asia. One's approach to archaeology, as to history, must in the final analysis be subjective. Personal interest, preference, and choice are bound to color it. In this contribution I have tried to cover as wide a field as possible within the permitted space, but, as will now have become obvious, the writer's personal predilections have governed the shape and content, even though these will not be shared by all readers. It would have been for the
easy to compile a dull but reasonably comprehensive catalog of
made
all
the
Mediterranean area during the most past ten or twenty years and to classify them. I have deliberately left out many discoveries made accidentally, such as that of the mummy of a young girl of remarkable beauty found in a Roman sarcophagus when significant discoveries
in the
Rome in 1964. The body was possible to take fingerprints, though heaven knows why! This was a purely accidental find and has nothing to do with pure archaeology. The same is true of the discovery, also made by a bulldozer, of 7,350 scjuare feet of splendid Roman mosaic floors which came to light in 1963 at Lucus Feroniae, twent\- miles from Rome. a bulldozer unearthed
was
it
near the Via Cassia in
so perfectly preserved
15 The Odyssey IV. 120;
GBWW,
that
it
\'ol. 4, p.
232
200b.
Leonard
Cottrell
NEW TECHNIQUES Italian archaeologists have been among the foremost in using the latest scientific techniques, even though they did not invent them. Some of these, e.g., aerial photography and earth resistivity tests, were pioneered in Britain. Others, such as "radiocarbon dating," had their origin in America at a time when the United States dominated the world of nuclear physics. This method is based on the fact that any piece of organic material, e.g., a fragment of wood or other vegetable matter, absorbs radiation throughout its life and once "dead" gives out radiation at a known rate. By the use of accurate measuring instruments, it is theoretically possible to establish the
amount
of radioactivity remaining,
and
PHOTOGRAPH OF FYFIELD DOWNS, WILTSHIRE, SHOWS RIDGES LYING BENEATH THE PRESENT TOPSOIL. THESE RIDGES WERE THE LAND DIVISIONS FOR CELTIC FARMERS OF THE LATE BRONZE AGE THIS AERIAL
Archaeology thus to find out the approximate age of the specimen.
may be
as great as plus or
Aerial photography
minus 350
The marginal
error
years.
was pioneered in Great Britain by John St. Joseph World War I, experience gained in aerial
of Cambridge. Shortly after
reconnaissance was applied to the discovery
of
archaeological
sites.
where the temperate climate and abundant vegetation encourage the rapid accumulation of soil and plant life above buried cities, sites invisible from the ground appear clearly in In
Britain
particularly,
aerial photographs.
The reasons
for this are that (a) in certain lights,
and before sunset, slight excrescences in the soil are revealed by shadows; and (b) where a Roman road or the foundations of buildings have been buried under soil, grass or crops growing above such remains will be of a diflFerent shade of green. Though this variation may be invisible to the naked eye, it can be detected on a photograph. Another technological device used by the Italians, and throughout Western Europe, is the magnetometer which measures the resistance of earth to the passage of electricity. This method, too, has been used by British archaeologists for a number of years, both on domestic and fore.g., after
eign
sunrise
sites. It
enables the investigator to plot the course of buried walls
or filled-in ditches, since these
disturbed
soil.
This method
ofiFer
is
more
electrical resistance
particularly useful
when
than un-
lack of time,
money, or other restrictions prevent wholesale excavation. This method was used in 1962 to help detect the long-lost site of the ancient Greek city of Sybaris, the Greek colony in southern Italy, the name of which is preserved in our word "sybarite." The people of Sybaris were notorious for their idle and luxurious way of life. The site is so heavily waterlogged that excavation of the whole area will be difficult and expensive. Powerful hydraulic apparatus is needed to pump dry even a small section. When, in 510 b.c, the neighboring city of Croton attacked and sacked Sybaris, they were so determined to obliterate all
the
site.
memory
of
it
that they diverted the course of a river over
Sixty-seven years later a
old, silted-up site
by Greek
new
city called Thurii
colonists,
one of
was
whom was
built
on the
the historian
this too was destroyed, and as for Sybaris, all remained was the memory of its wealth and hedonism, preserved in Greek and Roman literature. One reads how its horses were trained to dance to the flute; of banquet contests where the winning chef was awarded a year's copyright on his prize dishes; of one citizen named Smindyrides who slept on a bed of rose petals but complained that it gave him blisters; of emancipated Sybaritic wohkmi who spent one year in preparing an elaborate toilette to be displayed at one annual festival; and so on. No wonder that Norman Douglas wrote "Who would not live long enough, if he could, to see what comes to light?" As recently as 1959, this prospect seemed remote. The edition of the
Herodotus. But in time
that
234
MAIDEN CASTLE TELL AS SEEN FROM THE AIR
Encyclopaedia Britannica published in that year stated that "Explora-
have so far failed to lead to a precise knowledge of the site." But two independent archaeological teams identified it beyond reasonable doubt, buried some twenty and more feet below the sodden ground near the coast of Calabria, in the "heel" of Italy. Yet nothing was visible at ground level or from the air. During these investigations, one archaeological team, headed by Salvatore Foti, superintendent of antiquities for Calabria, used conventional methods, assisted by hydraulic engineers. Digging a pit to a depth of some twenty feet, he came upon remains of a fifth-century town which he has ascribed "with certainty" to Thurii. Below this level the archaeologists found potsherds of the sixth century b.c— contemporary
tions
in 1962
235
Archaeology with the
But it took seven days of continuous pumpand when the pumps had to stop, the pit filled
last years of Sybaris.
ing to clear the test
pit,
with water again within
six hours.
The other archaeological team, working independently bined the
efforts of F.
his helpers,
and the
of Foti,
com-
G. Rainey of the University of Pennsylvania, with
staff of
the Lerici Foundation headed
by
its
presi-
dent, Carlo Lerici, one of Europe's pioneers in the application of electronics to the study of geological substructures. Lerici,
career in Milan twenty-eight years ago,
is
who began
his
an engineer-industrialist whose
THE MAGNETOMETER USED TO MAP UNDERGROUND SYBARIS
hobby is archaeology. It was Lerici who discovered oil at Gela in Sicily and gas at Ferrandina. His work on the location and examination of Etruscan tombs is well known, and his experts have worked in Egypt and Turkey, where, in 1963, using electronic methods, they located the tomb of the Seleucid king Antiochus. At Sybaris Lerici's potentiometer traced a buried wall for more than one hundred yards, not far from Foti's excavation. Rainey then went into action with another apparatus, invented by the Oxford University Research Laboratory, which detects stone structures and other anomalies
underground with a proton magnetometer. These anomalies can be detected by observing the movements of protons in a bottle of alcohol con236
Leonard taining an electric
coil.
Cottrell
The device enabled Rainey
to continue plotting
the buried wall for a further three-quarters of a mile. This technique
might be roughly compared with X-raying a human body so
as to
make
the bones visible through the flesh.
These discoveries of things invisible to the eye tended to bear out the statement of the ancient writers that the walls of Sybaris extended over
deep under waterlogged ground— hence the eflFort and expense of draining and excavating it. Yet it might become another Pompeii, especially as its flooding and silting-up may have preserved objects that would otherwise have been looted. five miles.
Yet
all this
lies
Next, Lerici, not to be outdone, applied oil-drilling techniques. High-
embedded with worth noting that if an earlier generation of archaeologists had not learned and taught the technique of comparative dating by pottery styles such fragments would have meant nothing.) To speed up the process, the Lerici team introduced a water tanker coupled to the drill, which spewed up pottery fragments which could then be allocated to their appropriate levels and dated. These confirmed a sixth-century date. It was now certain that below the remains of Thurii were those of an earlier city which could hardly be other than Sybaris. Thus Petrie's "sequence dating" method was acspeed
drills
bored deep into the
soil,
datable fragments of pottery. (Here
bringing up cores
it
is
by modern technology. had dramatic results from his electronic and photographic surveys of buried Etruscan tombs. The Etruscans, whom the Greeks celerated
Lerici has
called Tyrrhenians,
created vast cemeteries near their
cities,
such as
and Fabriano. The Etruscans have always been something of a mystery and remain so. They created a high civilization in Italy long before the coming of the Romans, whom they fought and by whom eventually they were defeated. But no one can be sure where they came from; whether their culture grew up on Italian soil, or whether, as some ancient writers averred, they were immigrants from Asia Minor. Their cemeteries have been known for centuries and have been much robbed, but there are so many tombs that it seems possible that a few may have escaped plunder; also that some of the already plunCerverteri, Tarquinia, Vulci,
dered sepulchers
may
contain fine painted wall-frescoes. Inscriptions also
would be important, since Etruscan writing has still not been fully deciphered, and archaeologists continually hope to find a bilingual clue. Lerici used three interconnected methods in his surveys of Etruscan cemeteries: aerial reconnaissance and photography; earth resistivity tests for examination at close range; and finally camera examination. To save the labor of excavating a tomb, Lerici
drills
a small hole in the top
chamber and lowers into it a tube, like a periscope, with an arrangement of mirror-reflected lights which enables him to survey the interior. A camera is incorporated, with flash equipment, so that if the initial surof a
237
Archaeology
GOLD FUNERAL WREATH OF THE HELLENISTIC STYLE FOUND TOMB AT PERUGIA
IN
AN ETRUSCAN
can be photographed in color. At modern method. The Italian archaeological authorities had excavated about one tomb per year using conventional methods. Lerici located sixty at the rate of two per day. At Tarquinia, one of the best-known Etruscan cemeteries, the new methods approached mass production. Twenty-six hundred tombs were located, among which were twenty-two painted tombs. The last painted
vey reveals anything interesting
Fabriano, Lerici's team
this
tried
first
this
tomb
to be discovered before Lerici arrived was found in 1894. As The Times correspondent expressed it, "the known heritage of Etruscan painting has been doubled by this one survey." And at least one of these tomb chambers was inscribed in Etruscan, though, alas, no bilingual clue has yet been found. However, these quick-fire methods have their disadvantages. They make buried antiquities more and not less vulnerable, since once their
estabhshed they are likely to attract illicit diggers, unless fact, during recent years large numbers of Etruscan objects have appeared on the market to cater to a new, fashionable demand. Most of these, one can be sure, were obtained illicitly.
existence
is
adequately guarded. In
To
the writer, the most valuable aspect of electronic detection
earth resistivity tests
and
sites
is
that
it
by
enables preliminary surveys to be done
preserved for future methodical excavation. At Sybaris, for
238
Leonard instance, there
was grave danger
could have been built over, as
Cottrell
that,
new
if
the site
had not been
located,
it
being erected in the throughout the world have
factories are
One wonders how many important sites been obscured in this way, when the application of electronic methods would have detected them in good time. But it should also be realized that these new methods cannot be applied to all archaeological sites which, in many cases, will continue to need excavation by the old, welltried methods. Catal Hiiyiik, for instance, was discovered not by electronics but by the shrewd and experienced observations of Mellaart, who, like Petrie and Papademetriou, has "a nose for a site." Another technique, not applicable at all sites, is that of pollen analysis. It is well known (especially by suflFerers from hay fever) that in summer the air is impregnated with minute grains of pollen carried by the wind. Under a microscope these grains reveal the plant from which they came, whether it is a tree, a blade of corn, or wild grass. But it is not generally realized that in a favorable climate these grains may be preserved for thousands of years in waterlogged soil, e.g., peat bogs. If an archaeologist digs out a site in which these pollen grains have been preserved, his colleague the paleobotanist can recognize the plant species and thus build up a picture of the flora and fauna that existed at the time the site was occupied. (He can recognize the fauna from the type of plant on which certain animals feed.) If this occupation extended over hundreds of years, the paleobotanist can even describe the climatic changes which took place, and hence deduce how the human inhabitants reacted to area.
these changes.
This brings us to northern and western
Europe, especially Great
where climatic conditions are unfavorable to the preservation of wood and metal— which may survive in Egypt for five thousand years. Some objects, however, do manage to be preserved, especially in waterlogged ground, and these can be identified and examined by modern methods. A good example is the Mesolithic settlement at Star Carr in Yorkshire, England. This Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) site illustrates the difference between the archaeology of today and that of a century ago; between the obvious excitement of digging up a buried city rich in works of art, and the synthesizing of a long-vanished human society from objects which an earlier generation would not have looked for, or known how to interpret if they had found them. At Star Carr there was nothing visible on the ground or from the air. It was an unattractive, waterlogged piece of ground about five miles from Scarborough on the bleak North Sea coast of England. But there were geological indications suggesting that in early postglacial times the area might have bordered a freshwater lake. Two other areas in northern Europe, Vig in Sjaelland and Klosterlund in Jutland, where a similar geological structure exists, had yielded remains of human settlements of the Maglemosian period (6800-5000 Britain,
239
Archaeology B.C.).
Because of these
difficulty in the
mud
finds, in the fifties, trial pits
of Star Carr,
were sunk with some
pumps being used
continuously to
suck water from the deepening excavations.
The
investigators' guess proved correct. They found the rotted remains huge wooden platform made of birch brushwood— a kind of mattress built over the marshes that had bordered an ancient lake. On this platform the settlers would have built huts, probably of skins or reeds which had perished. But under the platform lay food waste, an enormous accumulation of animal bones: elk, ox, pig, red and roe deer, and water birds. There were also over seventeen thousand stone tools of the protoMaglemosian period, consisting of flint arrowheads, awls, saws, scrapers, hand-axes, etc. Bone implements had been made from deer antlers and
of a
elk bones.
Preserved in the slime were minute pollen grains which, under the microscope, enabled the paleobotanists to deduce what kind of vegeta-
had existed, and the type of climate that would have produced it. Carbon-14 analysis of a piece of birchwood yielded a date of 7488 B.C. plus or minus 350 years. In those days, after the glaciers of the last Ice Age had retreated, the climate had become warm and moist. Where today the North Sea breakers thunder beneath the cliflFs, and in winter tion
a bitter
wind
buffets the substantial hotels of Scarborough,
in considerable
numbers had
human
beings
on the marshes beside a placid food, and fishing from skin canoes. A wooden settled
lake, hunting game for paddle was found, the oldest navigational appliance yet discovered
anywhere in the world. These people did not grow crops— agriculture would not reach Europe thousand years— but they gathered edible plants And though they may possibly have domesticated the dog, they owned no other domestic animals. They probably observ^ed some kind of religious ritual. Stag frontlets, still bearing the antlers, had been made into headdresses with holes for fastening straps. Twenty-one of these were found and may have been used for ritual dances connected with the hunting of game; or the for at least another four
to
supplement
their food supply.
headdresses could have been used for stalking.
The
objects retrieved,
housed
in
a
museum, would hardly merit
passing glance from the average layman. Yet in their the imagination just as
much
five
cities that
came
a
they excite
as the gold-embellished furniture
Carter at Thebes and by Woolley at Ur,
more than
way
found by
into existence
thousand years after the hunter-fishermen of Star Carr had
rotted in the lakeside marshes abo\e which they lived
some nine thou-
have chosen this example because it illustrates very sand years ago. vividly the strides which archaeology has taken during the past thirty years, and because it afi^ords such a contrast with the treasure-hunting I
of a century ago.
240
Leonard
Cottrell
JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU, WEARING THE SCUBA EQUIPMENT HE INVENTED. THE MOBILITY WHICH UNDERWATER SWIMMERS GAIN WITH THE USE OF THIS EQUIPMENT HAS FACILITATED MANY NEW ARCHAE-
OLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
Another vast and potentially rich archaeological field has been opened by new techniques of underwater exploration. The offshore waters of the Mediterranean are littered with ancient wrecks, some dating from GrecoRoman and even earlier times. Though the timbers will usually have perished, the more durable parts of their cargoes, e.g., wine amphorae, statues and other works of art, and, in favorable conditions, metal objects, will
often have survived. Occasionally in the past magnificent works
have been dredged up accidentally by fishermen, e.g., the bronze statue of Poseidon now in the Archaeological Museum in Athens. But today, thanks initially to Jacques Cousteau and his pioneering work of
Greek
art
in the field of
underwater exploration, divers can move easily along the
seabed, locating, marking, and eventually excavating ancient ships. It is
possible to train amateur divers to
do reconnaissance work, thanks
and the introduction of the aqualung. In time, more and more of the younger archaeologists can be taught to use their special skills and trained eyes in locating and examining objects on the seabed. Among these may be the "underwater Petries" of the future. The archaeologist Philippe Diole is a noted exponent of this method, which he has described in his book 4,000 Years Under the Sea (1954). Some remarkable finds have already been made by this method. For instance, to the art of skin diving
in
1963 the Archaeological Society of Beziers in France, surveying the
241
Archaeology
Western Herault
found the cargo of a ship It was e\idently that of a bronzesmith. From an area about seventy-five feet by forty-two feet the underwater archaeologists have retrieved thirteen hundred bronze ingots, in all 359 pieces, eight weighing between eleven and fifteen pounds. There were also ingots of tin and 660 objects of bronze and copper, including axes, pins, brooches, belt buckles, earrings, arms, and hunting equipment. Even the manufacturer's trademark was still visible on some of the ingots. coastal waters of the
division,
dating from about twenty-five hundred years ago.
Near the trieved a
Isle of Giannutri,
Roman
oflF
the coast of Tuscany, Italian divers re-
shipload of plates, vases, and other tableware from
under eighteen fathoms. Parts of the ship, which sank in about 100 B.C., are still under the mud of the seabed where they were scattered some twenty centuries ago. Other wrecks are being discovered every year, and there is already a danger, similar to the one which Petrie and other pioneers recognized, that indiscriminate plundering by amateur treasurehunters
may
destroy valuable archaeological evidence.
One
hears dis-
quieting stories of rich playboys diving from their yachts in the Aegean
and coming up with Greek amphorae. But although such incidents are bound to happen— one cannot protect the entire Mediterranean from these activities— the location of buried wrecks is normally so difficult and their excavation so expensive that one may be sure that this new field of submarine archaeology will continue to yield valuable results for generations to come. One of its most exciting possibilities is the recovery of great works of art which the Roman entrepreneurs exported from Greece during the centuries of Roman occupation. From time to time these have been recovered in the past— the well-known Poseidon masterpiece is an example— but always by accident. Usually fishermen bring them up in their nets, and on more than one occasion such finds have been flung back into the ocean, for superstitious reasons. Nowadays, however, we have reached the stage when deliberate and scientific search for sunken antiquities is possible, given the money and facilities. It has already reached the treasure-hunting stage, e.g., in the search for sunken Spanish galleons and other treasure ships off the coast of Britain. But there can be no doubt that now and in the future the new techniques will be applied in the cause of scientific archaeology.
more than a century and a half of intensive exploration, the land from having yielded all the secrets of the buried past. And now that the seabed is becoming increasingly accessible, a new chapter is opening and one may confidently expect important and even sensational discoveries, especially under the Mediterranean, around which most of the earliest civilizations grew up, and in whose treacherous waters Egyptian, Cretan, Mycenaean, Phoenician, Persian, Greek, and Roman vesAfter
is
far
242
Leonard
Cottrell
must often have foundered. And not only ships
sels
or their cargoes
thousand years, earth movements have submerged ancient ports and harbors, e.g., oflF the coast of Crete where several are known to exist; and parts of ancient Alexandria, including the foundations of the famous lighthouse— one of the Seven Wonders of the World— now lie under water. Generally speaking, the wrecks of ancient ships are more likely to be discovered under the clear waters of the Mediterranean than oflF the coasts of the North Sea and the Atlantic. But there have been exceptions. One of these was the remarkable reclamation, by Swedish archaeologists, of a great warship, the "Vasa," which sank oflF Stockholm in a.d. 1628. She was lifted, mainly intact after over three hundred years, and was found to contain not only her guns and cargo but such things as leather boots, clay pipes, pewter mugs, navigating instruments, and even casks of butter. The "Vasa" herself has been painstakingly restored and reconstructed, her ancient timbers bathed in water-sprinklers to prevent them shrinking when exposed to the air after more than three hundred years of immersion. But the "Vasa" is of yesterday compared with, for example, a ship that was wrecked near modern Cape Gelidonya in Turkey, estimated to be three thousand years old. Believed to be the oldest ship so far discovered under water, she contained more than a ton of Bronze Age objects, including plowshares, picks, shovels, adzes, and knives. There were even olive stones and fish bones, relics of the sailors' await discovery. During the past
five
meals!
ARCHAEOLOGY
IN
Finally, turning again
GREAT BRITAIN to
brilliant archaeologists,
tions
made by
Great Britain, the training ground of so
one must begin by
many
recognizing the contribu-
generation after generation of zealous investigators, from
and seventeenth centuries— Leland, Dugdale, Browne, and the rest— to the scientifically minded young scholars of today who have applied laboratory techniques to the investigation of ancient remains. One of Britain's most valuable exports, culturally speaking, has been her archaeologists, many of whom, such as Petrie and Woolley, have spent most of their most productive years in countries far remote from their own.
the "antiquaries" of the sixteenth
In Britain, where there was a long-established tradition of "antiquari-
anism,"
Roman
villas and forts unearthed, and the and others were combed for any clue
roads were traced,
writings of Tacitus, Suetonius,
which might assist archaeologists in tracing the pattern of the Roman invasion and occupation of the island. But these clues were scanty, for the Roman historians were vague on topographical detail; to this day no one has identified the battlefield where the British King Caractacus 243
Archaeology
ATLANTIC
NORTH OCEAN
300 Kilometers
made
his last stand, or
rebel armies. But
where Suetonius Paulinus destroyed Boudicca's
much was
revealed in the excavation of the legionary
fortresses such as York, Lincoln,
had
left
and Caerleon, where long occupation
not only the buried foundations of buildings but in some cases
walls of considerable height. There were also
many
inscriptions
and
tombstones, especially near the forts along the seventy miles of Hadrian's Wall, the northernmost frontier of an empire which stretched from the
River Tyne in the north to the Nile in the south and the Euphrates in the east.
From these it was possible to trace the careers of high officials of the Roman Empire, the names of army units which had built sections of Hadrian's Wall, and individual names of soldiers and their families who had known that lonely rampart more than seventeen centuries ago. However, the great breakthrough in our knowledge of Roman Britain had to await the twentieth century, when aerial photography and other modern methods have revealed roads,
forts,
244
and
villas
which the nineteenth-
Leonard
Cottrell
century excavators could not detect. But this again was "in-filling." More important were the researches of scholars who probed much further back
than the period of the
mounds
of the Iron
Roman Empire;
Age and
those
who
excavated burial
the Bronze Age, in the Quantock Hills of
Somerset, the Cotswold Hills, and the highlands of Derbyshire, York-
Cumberland, and elsewhere. There were also the stone circles, of which the best known are at Avebury and Stonehenge in Wiltshire, and other examples exist in many places such as Great Rollright in Oxfordshire, Arbor Low in Derbyshire, and Keswick in Cumberland. Some of these, e.g., Stonehenge, date from the late Neolithic (New Stone Age) period, though they received additions in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Some date from the Bronze Age. There are also hilltop fortresses surrounded by earthworks of prodigious size, comparable in some ways with the work of the pyramid-builders of Egypt, since these earthworks were raised by men using picks made from deer antlers only. Similar camps and fortresses, stone circles, and stone-lined burial mounds have been excavated in France and Spain. Many of the hilltop camps date from the Iron Age (from about 300 b.c), and it was these oppida— strong points— which the Romans had to attack when they invaded Britain, as described by Tacitus. But some go back to the Bronze Age and even earlier in time. The stone circles, with their concentric rings of monoliths, usually approached by long avenues of standing stones, as at Avebury, appear to have been sun-temples, and some authorities think that this tradition of megalithic building began with the Mycenaeans in Greece and gradually spread along the northern coast of the Mediterranean through Spain to the Atlantic coast and thence to Brittany and Britain. Quite recently at Stonehenge, the most magnificent megalithic monument in Britain, the carving of a dagger was observed on one of the stones, and from the shape of this dagger some scholars have identified it as Mycenaean; but shire,
this in itself
does not pro\'e that the Mycenaeans themselves ever saw
Britain, only that their trade-goods reached the island. This would not
be surprising, since we know from the excavation of certain Bronze Age burial mounds in Britain that among the grave-goods were little cylindrical beads of faience which could only have been manufactured in Egypt about 1500 b.c. "Antiquities," wrote Sir Francis Bacon early in the seventeenth century, "are history defaced, or some remnants of history which has casually ."^^ escaped the shipwreck of time True enough; but what the great lord chancellor could not have known was that there is a link between the remote antiquities of Britain and the Neolithic settlements at Catal Hiiyiik, at Jericho, and at many sites .
.
16 Cf. Advancement of Learning, 2nd Bk.
II. 3;
245
GBWW,
Vol. 30, p. 34d.
Archaeology in the Levant.
The opposite ends
of the ancient
world— the
Fertile Cres-
cent in the east and the barbarous northern island in the west— were
connected, however remotely, by trade and cultural contacts long before the
Romans entered
Britain with their civilizing mission.
men
Revolution, during which
game and
The
Neolithic
ceased to depend entirely on the hunting
how
to grow crops and domesticate animals, began Middle East between 10000 and 5000 b.c. At that time the peoples of northern Europe were still hunters. The new way of life, which enabled mankind to settle in favored areas without the need to move, was
of
learned
in the
transmitted gradually across Europe, carrying with
it
religious beliefs
and customs, of which the building of megalithic monuments was one; another was the custom of interring the dead under large burial mounds and accompanied by grave-goods needed in the afterlife. There is a connection between the pyramids of Egypt and the tholos-tombs of Mycenae and the chambered tumuli still to be seen on the Cotswold Hills, in Derbyshire, Wiltshire, Cumberland, and elsewhere. "Towards the middle of the Third Millenium B.C.," writes Nicholas Thomas, groups of adventurers, farmers and herdsmen set sail from France and the mouth of the Rhine and settled in southern England. In a
which food production and were the characteristic features, had spread over Britain. We have to visualise boatloads of men, women, and children disembarking upon our shores and unloading sheep, cattle and seed grain for their first sowing-time. They had come to a fertile island, the higher ground easy to clear and cultivate with polished stone axes and shoe-blades. A network of rivers and natural land routes enabled them to penetrate deep into the rivers they had ^"^ braved the Channel to explore.
short time their revolutionary culture, in
domestication
of
animals
The Iron Age peoples followed with more advanced
agricultural tech-
niques and more sophisticated military methods, in about 300
b.c.
They
gave the conquering Romans a lot of trouble, and at Maiden Castle, in Dorset, their mighty fortress with its high concentric banks of earth encircling a central enclosure seemed impregnable. Here is a point where classical literature and archaeology meet, because Tacitus describes how Vespasian (much later to become Emperor) led the Second Augustan
Legion on a
One
of these
series of operations against
which has been
what the
positively identified
historian calls oppida. is
Maiden
Castle, the
Mortimer Wheeler, unaided by evidence apart from the vague reference to the
result of the archaeological research of Sir
any substantial literary oppida by Tacitus. There were two main
17 Nicholas Thomas,
gates,
A Guide
one on the
to Prehistoric
246
east, the other
on the west.
England (London: Batsford, 1960).
Leonard
marked today by high
turf
Cottrell
embankments
of complicated shape. Evi-
dently the Legion decided to attack the weaker east gate; they
down
first
laid
a barrage of ballista-arrows, powerful projectiles fired from spring-
guns. The body of one of the defenders was found with such an arrow embedded in his vertebrae, and it had entered from the front. The Sec-
ond Augustan then advanced, setting fire to some huts near the entrance, and under cover of the clouds of smoke the gate was assaulted and the position taken. But the defense had been fierce, and once they had entered the Romans showed no mercy. There seems to have been an indiscriminate massacre of men, women, and children until the troops were called to order. The dead were buried where they fell; Wheeler found, within the east gate enclosure, bodies of the fallen Britons, buried in
shallow graves, each with some small funerary
many showed how
oflFering.
The bones
of
they had died, by sword, spear, or arrow. This, then,
is the oldest British war cemetery known. The archaeologists also found "ammunition dumps" consisting of thousands of round pebbles used by the defenders in the sling-warfare for which they were famous, and for which their heavily ramparted camp had been designed.
More recently than Wheeler's excavation in the thirties, another Iron Age oppidum taken by the Romans has been identified at Hod Hill, also in Dorset. Here there was a concentration of ballista-bolts at one parwhich may have been the site of the chief's dwelling within Roman fort was built within the earthworks; units of a legion and some cavalry were stationed there, maybe to act as a police force while the people of the surrounding Cranborne Chase, a rich farming area, were being brought under subjection. It appears that the Jlomans did not have an easy time subduing this wild western ticular point,
the enclosure. Later a
country.
More has been discovered concerning
Roman
conquest and occupation of Britain during the past thirty years than during the preceding two centuries. This is the result of a number of reasons: the increasing the
and numbers of British archaeologists, especially among the younger armed with new knowledge and techniques; the increased use of aerial photography in locating sites usually invisible from the ground, especially roads, forts, and marching camps in north Britain and Scotland; and the use of earth resistivity tests— the proton magnetometer already described— in locating buried walls and filled-in ditches, thus cutting down the time needed for excavation. Another reason is the immense amount of road-building and other constructional work now taking place in Britain, which frequently leads to accidental finds not only of Roman but also of pre- and post-Roman remains. To name all the important finds made even during the past two decades would require a complete article in itself, but here are a few random examples. At Hinton St. Mary in Dorset a large and elaborate villa skill
generation,
247
DURING THE BULLDOZING OF A GARAGE-SITE IN COLCHESTER, ESSEX, AN ANTIQUE
ROMAN MOSAIC PAVEMENT WAS UNEARTHED. BY APPLYING PLASTIC ADHESIVE, THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS WERE ABLE TO TRANSPORT THE PAVEMENT TO A SAFER LOCATION
was recently discovered containing a magnificent mosaic pavement incorporating the Chi-Rho sign, one of the earliest symbols of Christianity, and a portrait of a young bearded man believed by some authorities to be a representation of Christ. The pavement has now been removed and set up in the British Museum. Near the Roman city of Chichester another even larger villa was unearthed and will be put on permanent display. From its size and elaborate construction— more like a royal palace than a nobleman's villa— it may well be the royal residence of Cogidumnus, a Roman client-king who is known to have been on very friendly terms with the invaders. A Latin inscription bearing his name and titles was discovered at Chichester many years ago; he bore the same titles as a much more famous client-king who ruled at the other end of the Roman empire— Herod the Great—and these are the only two native, non-Roman rulers who are known to have been so honored. One of the most fascinating finds at the Chichester villa is the remains of a Roman-type formal garden, the first to be found in Great Britain. The paths and flower-beds can be distinguished, and from surviving plant remains it will be possible to restock the beds with flowers and plants of the same type which flourished there some eighteen hundred years ago. Much excitement was generated recently when it was thought that the site of King Arthur's Camelot had been identified at Cadbury Hill, a It has the most elaborate arrangement of ramparts complete rings of banks and ditches enclosing about eighteen acres, the whole standing on an isolated hill some four hundred feet in height. Although the structure is mainly of the Iron Age, probably of the first or second century B.C., there is evidence from recent excava-
hill-fort in
Somerset.
in that county, four
248
.
Leonard tion that
it
was occupied
at a
much
Cottrell later date,
the period immediately following the end of the
corresponding roughly to
Roman
occupation
when
King Arthur— if he had existed— would have been alive. The west country—Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall— is closely associated with Arthur in legend. In Somerset there is Glastonbury Abbey in which he was supposed to have been buried. There is a strongly held belief among many archaeologists and historians that King Arthur— though the name is surrounded by mythical accretions— had a historic existence and was probably a Romanized British cavalry leader who fought the invading Saxons during the chaotic period following the withdrawal of the legions. Cadbury Hill Castle would be an ideal site for a fortress such as Camelot must have been, but, to date, nothing has turned up which would enable archaeologists to identify
The
interest aroused
by
it
positively.
this
The excavations
are continuing.
excavation illustrates several points which
emphasize in this essay— the links between archaeology, and legend, of which Troy and Mycenae are other examples. Archaeologists, though not as naive as Schliemann was, are less liable nowadays to dismiss myths and legends out of hand. Very often myths are a form of folk-history, passed on from generation to generation by people who were either illiterate or who lived before the invention of writing. And in the future there is no doubt that where such strong traditions exist they will be taken seriously, if cautiously, by I
have tried
to
literary history,
archaeologists.
One could go on quoting examples, all of which illustrate, in diflFerent ways and in varying degrees, the contribution which archaeology has made, and is making, to Western thought. But it is important to establish the true priorities. No matter how intriguing any individual discovery may be, whether it is a Paleolithic cave-painting of 20000 B.C. or a Roman villa of a.d. 200, a sunken wreck full of bronze ingots, an Egyptian royal tomb of the First Dynasty, or even the faint outline on an aerial photograph of a hitherto unknown hill-fort in France or Britain, the discovery in itself is only significant if it adds something, however little, to our knowledge of human development. The new technological skills
may
that are being increasingly applied to archaeological investigation fascinate us
by
treasure-hunting,
we
their ingenuity,
but
if
they are merely applied to
are no better than the ignorant plunderers
who
wrecked valuable sites in Egypt, Europe, and the Middle East one hundred or more years ago. In the final analysis, archaeology is only an extension of the experience which poets, artists, historians, and philosophers have been gathering and transmitting through written records and oral tradition during the past five thousand years. In the words of The Times leader in 1922, announcing the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, "The earth holds in her recesses the rich memories of our race."
249
JOHN PLAMENATZ
John Plamenatz was born in Cetinje, Montenegro, in 1912. He went to England in 1919, and was educated at Clayesmore School, Winchester, and Oriel College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and modern history. He was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1936. After serving in the British
Army from 1940
he was attached to the prime ministers Yugoslav government in exile. He served there until 1945, when he returned to All Souls. In 1951 Mr. Plamenatz was elected a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1967 he returned to All Souls as Sir Isaiah Berlins successor to the to 1942,
office of the royal
Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory. Among his many publications are: Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation
What Is Communism? (1947), The EngHsh Utilitarians The Revolutionary Movement in France, 1815-1871 (1952), German Marxism and Russian Communism (1954), On Alien Rule and Self-Government (1960), Man and Society (2 vols., 1963), and Readings From Liberal Writers, English and French (1965).
(1938), (1949),
250
Some American Images of Democracy
There
has been more theorizing about democracy, or about what
is
Western democracy in contrast with other kinds, in the United States than anywhere else in the world since the last war, and it has been in some ways a new kind of theorizing. If any one person can be said to have started it, that person is Joseph A. Schumpeter, whose most widely read book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, was published in 1942. Great claims have been made, sometimes boldly and sometimes by implication, for these new theories. Professor Robert A. Dahl, one of the most influential and gifted of the new theorists, found it necessary to say in A Preface to Democratic Theory that he did not hold a view fashionable in some quarters "that everything believed about democratic politics prior ."^ to World War I, and perhaps World War II, was nonsense. The early attacks on large-scale representative democracy were made in Europe by such writers as Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels, and Moisei called
.
Ostrogorski.
They
all
.
argued, in their different ways, that large-scale rep-
democracy was not, and indeed could not be, what its champions said it was or might be. These European critics of Western "mass" democracy were not against it because they rejected the moral ideals of its champions; they did not hold that, if mass democracy as described by believers in it had been possible, it would have been undesirable; they merely said or implied that in modern conditions it could not be what those believers said it was or could be. They did not even suggest that what in the West went by the name of democracy was bad because it fell so short of what believers in it claimed for it. Mosca, for example, though he thought it absurd to claim that there was, or ever could be, government by the people in the countries calling themselves democratic, was willing to admit that these countries were resentative
1
Robert A. Dahl,
A
Preface to Democratic Theory (Phoenix Books edition), p. 125.
251
The
Social Sciences
as well governed after they acquired the trappings of democracy as they had been before doing so. These European writers, who criticized not so much the political systems which were called democratic as the theories used to explain or justify them, made no serious attempt to construct more realistic theories to take the place of the ones they objected to. This attempt was made later by writers who were no doubt suitably impressed by the arguments of these critics but were also keenly interested in political systems which, however much they might fall short of ideals proclaimed by earlier champions of large-scale democracy, seemed to them infinitely preferable to fascism or communism. These writers, the revisionists in the sphere of democratic theory, have been mostly American. It is in the oldest and the
largest of the great "liberal" democracies that a sustained attempt has
been made
ways which would make some seem irrelevant. It may be that American writers about democracy have exaggerated the novelty of their explanations and the extent to which their empirical studies have pointed to conclusions damaging to older theories. I am inclined to believe that they have. I agree with what seems to be implied by the sentence I quoted from Dahl's Preface to Democratic Theory: that the older theorists were more realistic than some of the new theorists give them credit for being, and that therefore the new theorists are innovators rather less than they think they are. But this detracts nothing from the to explain
mass democracy
in
of the criticisms of a Mosca, a Michels, or an Ostrogorski
general proposition, that the boldest attempts to revise democratic theory
most challenging empirical inquiries into democratic processes have been made in the United States. In this essay I shall sometimes be sharply critical of these attempts and inquiries, and I therefore want to begin by paying tribute to them. Nothing as impressive, as many-sided, as much worth detailed criticism has been produced in Britain except on a smaller scale by writers greatly influenced by books and articles written by Americans. American scholars have made two kinds of contributions to democratic theory. On the one hand, they have tried to make more realistic assumptions and to use more suitable and precise terms in constructing a general theory of Western democracy; and on the other, they have made empirical studies, or surveys of such studies, with the avowed purpose of testing old assumptions and explanations and stimulating new ones. Examples of contributions of the first kind are Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialistn, and Democracy (some chapters of it), Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory, Anthony Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy, Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom's Politics, Economics, and Welfare, and Lindblom's The Intellif^ence of Democracy. Examples of the second kind of contribution are The People^s Choice by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard R. Berelson, and Gaudet; Voting, by Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and William N. as well as the
252
John Plamenatz
McPhee; The Voter Decides by Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren E. Miller; and American Voting Behavior by Eugene Burdick and Arthur Brodbeck. These are only a few among many. Lack of space obliges me to confine myself to examining only two kinds American contributions to democratic theory: deliberate atset up new theories free from the defects of older ones, and
of recent
tempts to
empirical studies undertaken with the express purpose of testing widely
Even in these spheres, I shall refer few books: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy; A Preface to Democratic Theory; An Economic Theory of Democracy; Politics, Economics, and Welfare; and two studies of electoral campaigns, The People's Choice and Voting. My purpose is not to survey generally the recent American contribution to democratic theory: it is only to select a few arguments and assumptions which seem to me of great theoretical importance and to look at them closely. This much, I think, can be done received ideas about democracy. specifically to only a
usefully even in an essay of this length. I need not, I hope, justify my selection of the four theoretical works have mentioned. They are very good books of their kind and they raise important issues. But I ought perhaps to explain why I have taken a particular interest in The People's Choice and Voting. They, too, of course, are very good books. They are close studies of elections and electoral campaigns in two specially selected small communities, and their authors insist that many more such studies need to be made if it is to be possible to reach firm conclusions of a general character. But the purpose of neither study is primarily to discover what happened in a small part of the United I
States over a short period of time.
avowed aim
make
They
are not local histories; their
and they are both highly speculative. They are among the best studies of their kind and are remarkable for their thoroughness as empirical investigations.
They
is
to
a contribution to democratic theory,
aware of it brought to their notice— for the boldness of their conjectures. This boldness is not to be condemned but welcomed. The reader can make up his own mind about what conclusions are supported by the information so elaborately collected, and the conclusions oflFered to him by the collectors can serve to enlighten him even though he rejects them. American boldness is not less useful in the realm of theory than is British caution.
and
are remarkable also— though their authors might be less
less
pleased to have
it
THE ATTACK ON OLDER THEORIES the American writers who, one or other of the two ways Many mentioned, have contributed democratic theory have attacked of
in
to
what some not
of
know who
them have called the first
spoke of
"classical theory" of
this "classical theory,"
253
but
it
democracy.
I
do
figures conspicu-
The
Social Sciences
ously in the twenty-first chapter of Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy. Unfortunately, Schumpeter's account of
it
is
brief,
vague, and mis-
doubtful whether any political theorist ever held the theory attacked by Schumpeter. This, in itself, might not matter; for leading. Indeed,
it
is
the theory attacked might be an
amalgam
of parts of old theories put
together by Schumpeter to enable him to destroy a
number
of widely
received misconceptions before going on to produce a more realistic
theory of his own. Putting up a straw theory for immediate destruction
way of disposing of empty or confused or which stand in the way of clear and realistic thinking. It can also do harm, if the maker of the straw theory does not know that he is foisting upon past thinkers ideas they never held. He may thereby discourage his readers from studying, carefully and without prejudice, theories which are much less familiar to him than his way of speaking about them suggests and yet are worth close study. He may also, without perhaps being aware of it, put some of the ideas he attacks less well than they could be put. His easy and confident dismissals of his own poor versions of them may divert his readers from looking closely at these ideas and appreciating their merits as tools of explanation. Schumpeter attributes what he calls "the classical theory of democracy" to the Utilitarians, and he also speaks of the ideas of a "general will" and of a "uniquely determined common good" (by which he appears to mean some one aim which all or most citizens agree should take precedence over other aims) as being parts of this classical theory. But the Utilitarians who favored democracy— Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill— never used the expression the general will and nev^er spoke of a common good in the sense attacked by Schumpeter. Far from being discan be a quick and sharp
irrelevant ideas
ciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau,
who made
so
much
of "the general will"
and "the common good," these three Utilitarian democrats, the most famous of their school, were among his severest critics. They advocated not government by the people as Rousseau understood it but representative democracy. They advocated what Rousseau had gone out of his way to attack precisely because he believed that no "general will" and no "common good" could emerge or be achieved inside it. Of the three great Utilitarian democrats, at least two, James and John Mill, were well aware that in the sort of democracy they favored, the people generally do not reach decisions on public issues when they elect representatives to the legislature.
Schumpeter's attack on "the classical theory of democracy" must leave who knows something about the great political thinkers of the
the reader
past uncertain whether
it
is
the beliefs of the Utilitarians or those of
Rousseau that are under attack, whereas the reader who knows very little must get the impression that the Utilitarians had nothing to say about
254
John Plamenatz
democracy worth his notice. But the Utilitarians were the first to construct and detailed argument for representative democracy on the ground that, in a literate community with a tradition of constitutional government, it provides for the people's wants more effectively than does any other form of government.- Whereas Rousseau, whose favorite expressions Schumpeter foists upon the innocent Utilitarians, insisted time and again that people who elect representatives to make decisions in their name do not themselves make the decisions.'^ Rousseau's case against representative government is in fact a repudiation of some of the illusions that Schumpeter set about demolishing when he attacked "the classical theory of democracy." How odd it is that he should have hit upon Rousseau's expression "the general will" to refer to illusions which Rousseau had attacked long before him in the course of explaining the a coherent
virtues of the general will!
do not suggest that Rousseau or the two Mills— or indeed anyone else who died long ago— anticipated the positive contributions to democratic theory of the writers whose works I want to consider. They may have anticipated some of them, for even the most gifted innovators have precursors. But that is not the point I am concerned to make. I suggest I
rather that this sort of misrepresentation of past thinkers has consider-
ably impoverished, and sometimes even spoiled, the thinking about democracy of the writers who in recent times have made the largest contribution to democratic theory. They have had much to give but might have had even more, had they been more willing to learn from some of the earlier thinkers.
Schumpeter,
who was among
the
first
to attack the
now much
attacked
democracy," was for many years a European before he became an American. I call him an American theorist of democracy not so much because he wrote about democracy after he came to America as because his positive ideas about it owe a great deal to reflection on "classical theory of
American racy
who
practice. Actually,
no native-born American
has enlarged our understanding of
it
theorist of
democ-
has displayed such igno-
much read and much admired twenty-first chapter of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Schumpeter was a man of vast, of Germanic, learning who ventured out of economic into political theory rather late in life. A highly gifted man, he had things to say, even about democracy, that were well worth saying. In only one justly famous sentence, he made an important contribution to political theory when he defined democracy as "that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire rance of past theory as Schumpeter does in the
the
power
to decide
by means
of a competitive struggle for the people's
2 John Stiiart Mill, Representative Government, in GBWW, Vol. 43, pp. 325-442. 3 Cf. for example, The Social Contract, in GBWW, Vol. 38, pp. 421c-422d.
255
The
Social Sciences
which needs to be qualified and explained, but makes an excellent beginning. That most generous of critics, John Stuart Mill, would have appreciated it. Just as Schumpeter makes a misleading attack on what he calls "the
vote."'* It is a definition it
classical theory of
democracy," so Professor Dahl,
in
A
Preface to
Demo-
makes another on what he calls "Madisonian democracy." Madison, says Dahl correctly, feared "the tyranny of the majority" and wanted to provide against it by a separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers and by "a system of checks and balances." But there is in fact, so Dahl argues, no danger of such a tyranny, especially in a democracy as large even as the newly independent colonies of Madison's cratic Theory,
day. There has never been, there never will be, in a vast democracy, a
majority of the people united on policies which they then impose on a is always by a minority, and Madison's thinking otherwise is a sign that he misunderstood how democracy on a large scale works. As Professor Dahl would be among the first to admit, we are still a long way from understanding clearly how such a democracy works. Madison no doubt held some mistaken opinions. But I doubt whether he believed that there could be a tyranny of the majority in the sense denied by Dahl. The majority Madison had in mind was surely a majority of the legislature or of persons holding high office.^ It was not a majority of the citizens united on matters of policy and determined to impose their policies on the minority regardless of their rights. At least, I know of nothing said by Madison which supports Dahl's interpretation of his meaning. As Dahl admits, Madison knew that in a large community there is always a wide variety of interests and beliefs, and he welcomed it because he believed that it helped to preserve democracy from lapsing into tyranny. But Madison presumably also knew that in a democracy, large or small, ambitious and unscrupulous politicians can sometimes exploit popular grievances to get control of the legislature and of the
minority regardless of their basic rights. Tyranny
executive.
There may be less danger of this happening in a large representative democracy than in a small direct one, but it is still a danger to be guarded against. Unscrupulous politicians cannot get this control unless they persuade a majority of the citizens, or at least a large proportion of them, to vote them into power. They derive their authority from popular support, and yet their rule is tyrannical because it oflFends against principles of justice which the people ordinarily accept or ought to accept in their own enduring interest, not excluding the interest of
4 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Harper Torehbook edition), chap, xxii, p. 269. 5 Cf. for example, The Federalist Number 10, in GBWW, Vol. 43, pp. 49c-53a.
256
John Plamenatz the citizens is
who
voted the tyrannous majority into power. This,
what most poHtical
writers
mean when
I
suggest,
they speak of "tyranny of the
majority" in a large pohtical community.
makes the best sense
of
It is the interpretation which and yet does not imply in the least say, decide on policies which they then impose
what they
that the majority of citizens
on the others without regard to their rights. Why should we suppose that Madison, a man of quite exceptional shrewdness and breadth of mind, meant something different by it? The German people, just before Hitler came to power, outnumbered the Americans of Madison's day by fifteen or more to one, and their interests and beliefs were presumably at least as varied and divergent. They had more parties and many more pressure groups to speak and act for them. Yet Hitler, by skillfully and boldly exploiting popular grievances, succeeded in getting control of the Reichstag and of the government, and then used his power to establish a tyranny supported, for a time at least, by something close to a majority of the people. It is methods of getting and exercising power broadly similar to his that political writers have in mind when they speak of the tyranny of the majority. They have in mind
demagogue who first gets power legally by getting popular support and then abuses that power, and not a majority of citizens united on definite policies. This abuse of power legally obtained is possible even though, as Professor Dahl insists, "the making of governmental decisions is not a majestic march of great majorities united upon certain matters of basic policy" but much rather "the steady appeasement of relatively ."^ Is it not an abuse which can be averted, at least to small groups. some extent, by a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances? If an American Hitler were to win as many seats in Congress as the
.
.
German Hitler won in the Reichstag in the last free elections of the Third Reich, would he not be further from getting power? Professor Dahl takes frequent notice of the fact that every political system is part of a social system, and says quite rightly that how it func-
the
depends largely on its social environment. But from time to time he appeals to this solid truth to lend weight to a judgment which gains nothing from the appeal. Speaking of Madison's argument for a separation tions
of powers,' he says:
"The Madisonian argument exaggerates the impor-
tance, in preventing tyranny, of specified checks to governmental officials
by other
specified governmental officials;
it
underestimates the importance
and balances existing in every pluralistic soDahl himself admits in another connection, was point to these "social checks and balances" (to the wide
of inherent social checks ciety."^
among
But Madison, the
first
to
as
6 Dahl, op. cit., p. 146. 7 To find Madison's arguments, see 8 Dahl, op. cit., p. 22.
Democracy 257
5c
in
The Syntopicon.
The
obstacles to tyranny.
suspect that he did.
Madison
tion to
interests among a numerous people) as important He may even have exaggerated their importance in
and
variety of groups
this respect. I
Social Sciences
suspect also that Dahl's real objec-
I
not that the latter treated social conditions as unim-
is
much importance
portant but that he attributed too
to
constitutional
rules.
Now,
one thing to object to Madison that he held mistaken and
is
it
too hopeful opinions about the
and quite another
eflPects
of particular constitutional rules,
he exaggerated the importance most ingenious and perceptive when
to say that in general
of such rules. Professor
Dahl
is
at his
he argues that some of the provisions of the federal Constitution, favored by Madison on the ground that they would make it more difficult for majorities to
impose
on minorities, have in fact made it prevent justice being done to the un-
their wills unjustly
easier for privileged minorities to
But
privileged.
this
tional rules really
Dahl claims
to
argument,
if it is
sound, goes to show that constitu-
do matter. have shown that "constitutional
rules are not crucial,
independent factors in maintaining democracy; rather, the rules themselves seem to be functions of underlying non-constitutional factors."^ Before the reader can assess this claim, he must know what Dahl understands by crucial and underlying. Constitutional rules do not suffice to maintain democracy and would not operate as they do were the other conditions of democracy not present. Is this perhaps what Dahl means
by
calling
case,
them functions
we can
tional rules.
of non-constitutional factors? But, then, in that
also say of these factors that they are functions of constitu-
For they,
too,
would not
suffice to
the absence of certain rules prescribing
how
maintain democracy in
public offices were to be
What can be meant by saying What are constitutional rules if
acquired and exercised.
that constitutional
rules are not crucial?
they are not rules
laying
down how
public authority
is
to
be gotten and used? What makes
a political system democratic rather than aristocratic or something else, if it is
not rules of this sort? Government
or instinct;
it
is
not a matter of mere habit
consists of regular or rule-directed activities. If constitu-
tional rules are not crucial to
democracy, then rules of grammar and
syntax are not crucial to language.
We can distinguish between two kinds of constitutional rules in a democracy: rules inherent to democracy in the sense that they must be observed if a practice is to be reckoned democratic (for example, rules ensuring that elections to certain offices are popular and free), and rules which are held to support democracy but are not inherent to it because to observe them is not in itself to practise democracy (for example, rules prescribing a separation of powers).
9 IhicL,
It
p. 137, italics.
258
hardly makes sense to ask of rules
John Plamenatz of the
first
kind whether or not they serve to maintain democracy, for it as means to ends. To practise democracy is by some such rules, though the rules need not be exwherever democracy is practised. About rules of the second
they are not related to definition to observe actly, similar
we
kind
whether undermine it), just
can, of course, inquire
their observance serves to main-
as we can put the same question about social conditions of other kinds. We may even have good grounds for holding that, in the United States or Britain, the abolition of a particular constitutional rule or set of rules would be a greater or lesser danger to democracy than the disappearance of particular social conditions. But how can we establish that in general such rules contribute less or more to preserve (or to undermine) democracy than does any other category of social conditions? How, for example, can we establish that the survival of democracy depends less on the observance of constitutional rules not inherent in it than it does on the class structure? I doubt whether any political theorist has ever held consistently to the opinion that constitutional rules do not matter greatly. Very often, when he attacks excessive concern for such rules, he has in mind some particular rule or set of rules which he thinks is less important than other people say it is. A Preface to Democratic Theory is in part an attempt to formulate precise rules which rulers and citizens must observe if the political system they constitute is to be reckoned democratic. They are, as Dahl
tain
democracy
(or to
formulates them, very general rules, and are not to be found ivord for word in any written constitution, nor even among the conventions of any
democratic country as constitutional lawyers define them. Yet Dahl would claim, presumably, that constitutions, laws,
ment
his rules
if
and conventions must implethem are to be accounted
the countries which observe
true democracies. Logically, he must make this claim or else admit that he failed of his purpose when he wrote his book. Everyone agrees that, if a country too large to practise direct democracy is still to be democratic, there must be free as well as popular elections to its supreme legislature. Every such country must have rules ensuring that these elections are free and the rules must be observed, but they need not be precisely the same rules in every country. If we take any two such countries, we shall probably find that each has rules about balloting or about the nomination of candidates which the other does not have, and which it nevertheless must have to ensure that elections really are free. The rules peculiar to each country, no less than the rules it shares with the other, are constitutional rules inherent to democracy in that country because the keeping of them is involved in the actual carrying out of a democratic practice in conditions peculiar to that country. But there may be other political practices, not in themselves democratic (for example, those involved in the operation of a federal system), needed to establish or preserve
democracy
in
one country though not
259
in another.
The
Social Sciences
France can be democratic without also being federal, but Yugoslavia probably could not be. The rules involved in these other than democratic practices are of course also constitutional, and their observance may be necessary to the survival of democracy. We cannot prove that they are unimportant to democracy in one country by pointing to some other country which is also democratic and does not have them.
An adequate
theory of representative and liberal democracy would
formulate the basic rules that governments and citizens must observe
if
community they belong to is to be reckoned a democracy kind and would explain what practices (and what particular rules
the political of this
inherent to them) are required for the observance of these basic rules in conditions
common
peculiar to one or It
would
kind of democracy or more important of them.
to all countries aspiring to this
more
also explain
of them, especially the
how
certain other practices, not in themselves
democratic, serve to maintain democracy (or to endanger
common
it)
under these produced
or peculiar conditions. Needless to say, no one has yet
such a theory, or could produce
it
without incorporating in
it
ideas taken
from many other thinkers and tested by a wide variety of empirical studies, many of them not yet undertaken. There is a vast amount still to be done, both empirically and in the realm of theory. It is in America above all that scholars have understood the size and difficulty of the undertaking and have gone to work with energy and imagination.
The saying
that rules, constitutional or otherwise, are functions
of
underlying social factors or conditions looks solid and even profound. It
also virtually it
Marx behind it. It is attracti\'e to sociologists. It is empty. The more closely we consider it, the less intelligible
has the authority of
appears. Montesquieu taught us over two hundred years ago that every
part of social
life is
deeply
afiFected
by the other
So too
in
and he attributed Madison in his time.
parts,
great importance to constitutional rules. ^^ So did
our time has Professor Dahl.
ECONOMIC MODELS OF DEMOCRACY Democratic
theory in America in the
last
and has
twenty-five years has been
be systematic and precise, sometimes in conscious imitation of economics. An extreme example is Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy. Dahl and Lindblom, in Politics, Economics, and Welfare, discuss both political and economic matters, though the book is much more an exercise in political than in economic theory. But, even when it treats of political processes, it adapts ideas and methods long used by economists to the explanation to a large extent utilitarian,
10 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws,
in
GBWW, 260
also sought to
Vol. 38.
John Plamenatz of them. Dahl and Lindblom speak of wants and preferences, and of endeavors to maximize goal achievement or, as others have put it, the satisfaction of wants. In a variety of ways, they assimilate the role of the
ordinary citizen or voter in a democracy to that of the consumer, as
economists have conceived of
it,
and the
role of the political leader to
that of the producer.
The word maximize was coined by Bentham, who was
a jurist
and
student of politics and only slightly an economist. But since his time,
and until quite recently, it has been much more used by economic than by political theorists. Bentham called the doctrine of the rights of man so dear to the fathers of modern democracy, the American and the French revolutionaries, "nonsense on stilts," and he made fun of the notion that the people have a "united will."
A man
acts rationally,
according to
Bentham, when he chooses the means available to him best adapted to That government is best which in general enables citizens to make the most eflFective use of the means within their power to attain their ends. Bentham assumed that men aim always at getting pleasure and avoiding pain, so that to help them to get what they want is to maximize their happiness; but this part of his doctrine does not concern us here. Toward the end of his life, Bentham came to believe that, in countries socially and culturally similar to his native Britain, the type of government most likely to do this was representative democracy, and he put forward the first thoroughly utilitarian arguments for that kind of political system. It is, he thought, of all political systems, the best suited to maximize the satisfaction of wants (or, as Dahl and Lindblom put it, goal achievement) wherever the people are sufficiently enlightened to see that it is so and to act accordingly. The proper end of government is to maximize this satisfaction, and the rights it secures to its subjects his ends.
are justified only to the extent that they too serve this purpose.
Bentham to the more soDahl and Lindblom. Nevertheless, they are all examples of the same type of theory, though Bentham was as much concerned to exhort as to explain, while Dahl and Lindblom's prime business is explanation. Utilitarianism and classical economic theory were born twins, and some of the too simple ideas used by Bentham and James Mill to explain political behavior or to make a case for democracy were not unlike some which the early economists used more plausibly to explain the production and distribution of wealth and to advocate laissez-faire. These ideas, common to early economic theory and to early Utilitarian democratic theory, have since then had, if I may so put it, a more busy and distinguished career in the first of these spheres than in the second. The many refinements upon them made since Bentham's time have mostly been the work of economists, and it is only recently that there have been It is a far
cry from the simple arguments of
phisticated ideas of
attempts, above
all in
the United States, to introduce these refinements
261
The
Social Sciences
I suspect that, not only in their earlier and cruder and more sophisticated forms, these ideas are better suited to explaining economic than political behavior. This is not to say that it has been a mistake to reintroduce them into political theory. It is only by trying to use them to explain political proc-
into political theory.
but also
in their later
esses that
we can
discover
how
far they are suited to this purpose, or
how
can be quahfied to make them better suited. Downs, as the title book suggests, believes that they are already pretty well adapted
far they
of his
to this use. I
Dahl and Lindblom are more
shall confine myself, in this part of
my
cautious. essay, to considering the as-
sumptions and arguments of only two books, and
must make
so, in fairness to
the
though they are both basically utilitarian. Only Downs's book is a thoroughgoing attempt to use ideas taken from economics to explain how Western democracy functions. Dahl and Lindblom, in much of their book, are concerned with arguments for and against economic planning, or with attempts to distinguish between different kinds of control (or ways in which men affect one another's decisions), or with something else which is not properly democratic theory. Many economists would agree that, even in a money economy, the assumptions and explanations typical of their science apply more closely to the producer for the market than either to the consumer or to the government considered as a spender of money. It is the producer for the market who seeks to maximize his returns and minimize his costs, measuring both his returns and costs in money. Though the consumer has money to spend and must decide how to spend it, he can only in some authors,
I
it
cases reach his decisions
clear that the books differ greatly,
by making
calculations of the sort that the
effi-
cient producer makes.
The consumer makes three kinds of decisions. Sometimes he buys this more of this and less of that, in the hope that by so doing he will get more of something he wants. He then makes the same
rather than that, or
producer for the market. Let us call it a calculated At other times, he buys this rather than that because, though the benefits expected from the two purchases cannot be measured against one another, he nevertheless upon reflection prefers some benefits to others. He then makes a considered decision, which is different in kind from the calculated decisions typical of the producer. At still other times, he buys something simply because he feels like doing so. He makes an unconsidsort of decision as the
decision.
ered decision.
The consumer
as a
spender of money has a privilege denied to the It is thought quite proper that he should
producer and the government.
some extent, a careless spender, a maker of unconsidered decisions. Governments, since they spend public money, are expected to make only
be, to
calculated or considered decisions. In practice, they
262
more often make de-
John Plamenatz second kind than the first, leaving it to experts and subordithe first kind on their behalf. Producers for the market
cisions of the
nates to
make
make mostly
calculated decisions. But sometimes,
olent employers, they
make
when
they act as benev-
considered decisions, as for example
when
they decide to provide their employees with amenities or services because
they think
right to
it
do so and not because they expect
to increase pro-
duction thereby. Just as
of
we have
three kinds of spenders of
we
the sort of democracy
so, in
makers of
political decisions: voters,
or of pressure groups),
hold elected
now
are
and holders
money
middlemen
money economy, we have three kinds
in a
considering,
(i.e.,
of public office, of
offices are of particular
concern to
leaders of parties
whom
those
who
us.
MAXIMIZING GOAL ACHIEVEMENT meant by "maximizing goal achievement" when and votes can be counted. Just as the producer can say, "By spending a thousand dollars on machinery rather than on labor, I can get fifty dollars more profit," so the party leader can say, "By promising X rather than Y, I stand to gain more votes from citizens who want X than the votes I stand to lose from citizens who want Y." It is much less easy to see what "maximizing goal achievement" involves in the case of the maker of what I have called
It
is
easy to see what
the goal
is
is
profits or votes, since profits
considered decisions. Are
achievement"
(or, as
we
it,
man maximizes
his
"goal
"the satisfaction of his wants")
when many
to say that a
others put
he uses the resources available to him in such a way as to satisfy as as possible of his wants in the order of preference in which he himself puts them? But this formula, which looks so neat, is of very limited application. Except where resources can be measured, in money or in units of time or in some other way, it is impossible to decide how much of them has been "allocated" to one purpose rather than another. Moreover, both wants and orders of preference among them continually change. In saying
this, I
who
have
in
mind not
the sort of change to which a
man
is
liable
begins by being more hungry than thirsty and then, having taken
food,
becomes more
thirsty than hungry.
I
have
in
mind something
quite
diflFerent.
Though wants
are not continuous but recurrent, it still makes sense man's recurrent wants that some are more important than others when they recur more frequently or are more highly preferred to say of a
when
they do recur, in the sense that he is willing to spend relatively more money or time or something else that is measurable in the attempt to satisfy them. I have in mind the kind of change which consists in wants recurring less frequently than they used to do or in their being less highly preferred than they used to be or in their disappearance or in the emer-
263
The gence of it is
new
often an
wants.
We
Social Sciences
wants. This kind of change eflPect
can only
we
what we do
of
in the
is
largely unpredictable, though
endeavor
to satisfy our existing
to a slight extent take care that, in satisfying
our
be well placed to satisfy the wants we shall have as a result of what we and others are now doing. This kind of change in wants or in orders of preference among them is of peculiar importance in the sphere of politics, so that very often political behavior cannot be assessed as being more or less successful in maximizing goal achievement. The voter votes perhaps only once a year, or once every few years, and though he may vote again and again for the same party, or even for the same candidate, what he wants the party or candidate to do for him, or for some group he belongs to, or for his country, may vary considerably and unpredictably from election to election. Or he may not want the party or the candidate to do anything specific but may yet, quite reasonably, cast his vote as he does because he trusts it or him to look after the interests of people placed much as he is in society. Or he may come to prefer the policies of the party or candidate he votes for to other policies without considering what they are and their likely consequences merely because they are recommended to him by someone he respects. It is odd to speak of the citizen casting his vote as seeking to maximize his goal present wants,
shall
achievement.
The
political leader
leader, he
is
of course diflFerently placed. If
wants himself or
needs to get
office or to get
he
is
a party
many votes as he or it power, and these are perhaps the most en-
his party to get as
during of his political wants; he has them as long as he remains in
politics.
But they are not his only, nor even always his strongest political wants; he may stick to a policy which he knows will prevent his getting office or his party getting power. He is much more likely than the voter to support clearly defined policies, putting some before the others; and he will think about them more often and change his mind more deliberately. He will come much nearer than the voter to having a pattern or ordered set of policies or political demands changing sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly over the years in ways which he and others can notice and take into account. This set of policies will no doubt change greatly and unpredictably during the course of a long career. But, over a considerable period of time, it may change little and find frequent expression in his speeches and other actions. Of the party leader, not only during election campaigns but between them, doing what he can to gain as many votes and to lose as few as possible, we can say that he is maximizing goal achievement. We can say it too of the holder of public office who, over a period of time, has a pattern or ordered set of policies and
who
acts consistently in pursuit of them.
But the maximizing in the second case is an operation diff^erent in kind from what it is in the first case. In the first case, the party leader is maxi-
264
John Plamenatz mizing votes in the same sense as the producer for the market maximizes he is making a series of calculated decisions. In the second case, the maximizing of the officeholder consists of operations similar in kind to those of the consumer who spends his income carefully to satisfy many profits;
The holder of office, like the consumer, takes one decision after another to achieve a variety of goals which constitute a set such that, in pursuing any one goal, he takes account of how what he does may affect his ability to pursue the others. It then makes sense to say that, had he taken other decisions, he could have achieved more of his goals, or more of the ones standing high on his order of preferences. But it makes sense to say this only to the extent that he has a consistent order of preferences among his goals. To be consistent, he need not, of course, prefer one goal to another in all circumstances; he need only always prefer it to the other in similar circumstances. If, then, we know what his goals are, and his preferences among them under such and such circumstances, and know also the circumstances in which he has made decisions (or has failed to make them when he could have done), we can decide how successful the official has been in maximizing his goal dissimilar recurrent wants.
achievement. If we are to speak sensibly of anyone maximizing his we must have in mind only some of his activities. If we
goal achievement, take
all his activi-
it makes no sense to way. We must take him always in a well-defined role: as a spender of money, or as a peasant running a farm to produce a va-
ties into
account, even over a short period of time,
speak of him in
this
riety of products for himself
and so
and
his
dependents, or as a political leader,
on.
Though
it
may
often
make
sense to say of certain activities which are
do or do not help to maximize whose activities they are, it never makes sense to say of the democratic process as a whole that it helps to maximize the goal achievement of a community of persons. If to make a utilitarian case for preferring one thing to another is to show how in the long run it serves to maximize this achievement more effectively than any alternative to it, then democracy is not to be preferred to other forms of government on utilitarian grounds. Professor Downs insists that in his book he is not making a case for democracy; he is not advocating it in preference to other systems. He is merely explaining it; or, rather, he is constructing a model to show how representative democracy would function if everyone taking part in it acted rationally, as economists understand rationality. A rational action he defines as an "action which is efficiently designed to achieve the consciously selected political or economic ends of the actor." ^^ "Every gova part of the democratic process that they
the achievement of
11
some
of the goals of the persons
Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory
of
265
Democracy,
p. 20.
The
Social Sciences
ernment," he says, "seeks to maximise political support,"^- reckoned in terms of the votes cast for it. Citizens, in deciding how to vote, consider the benefits likely to
come
they are "streams of
utility
their
way, benefits of which Downs says that
derived from government action." ^"^
A
party
team of persons who seek to gain or to keep control of "the governing apparatus" by winning elections in competition with other teams. "Every member of the team has exactly the same goals as every other," so that their goals can be seen "as a single, consistent preference-ordering."^^ This means, I take it, not that every member has the same preferences as every other among the team's goals, but that all the members of the team are bound by an agreement as to what the team's goals are and the priorities among them. Downs distinguishes between the goals of the team or party and the private ambitions of its members. He assumes for the purposes of his model that a party will carry out its functions "only in so is
a
far as
doing so furthers the private ambitions of
its
members."^"'
functions are to formulate policies and to advocate them, and,
power, to put them into goals of the party
A
party's
if it
and the
wins
To formulate policies is to decide on priorities among them. Downs therefore
effect.
the as-
sumes that the members of a party pursue its goals, not because they value them in themselves, but for the sake of achieving their private ambitions. Party leaders ordinarily cannot achieve their private ambitions unless their party wins elections, and therefore "parties formulate policies in order to esis of
win
elections." This, says
our model." ^^ Another
is
Downs,
is
"the fundamental hypoth-
that "every individual, though rational,
is
also selfish." ^^
Downs
admits that the assumptions he makes are not
The
individual, even
man
of business.
when he
strictly true.
But then, as economic and other theorists often remind us, the assumptions of a model do not have to be strictly true if the model is to increase our understanding of how things happen in the real world and our ability to make predictions. The businessman is not always striving to increase his profits when he allocates his resources, but he does so much of the time. It is one of his chief concerns, and the one he shares with nearly all other men of business. So the economic theorist, to avoid excessive complexity, assumes that this concern with profits is the sole concern of the
But the
real objection to
pohtically, acts selfishly,
12 13 14 15 16 17
is
acts politically,
not always
selfish.
assuming that the individual, when he acts not that the assumption
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., pp.
is
25-26.
Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 28.
Ibid., p. 27.
266
is
false
but that
it
John Plamenatz It would have been enough for have assumed that the individual acting politically acts rationally in the sense defined. It matters not at all whether what a man wants benefits himself or others; it matters only that he should have a stable order of preferences among his wants. For, provided he has such an order, he can then act rationally to satisfy the wants included in
contributes nothing to Downs's model.
Downs
to
that order.
what he wanted to explain by means of his model. Downs assume that a party carries out its function "only in so far as doing so furthers the private ambitions of its members." The aim of a party, Downs tells us, is to maximize its political support, and its functions are to formulate policies and to carry them out if it gets power. He assumes further that a party chooses its policies only in the hope of increasing the support it gets from the voters. Though this last assumption is So, too, given
had no need
to
it does at least simplify the model. And begin by making only a few simple assumptions to
also not really true to the facts, it is
sound method
to
see how far they will go in explaining the new assumptions or refine upon the old ones
and then to introduce model gradually closer to the facts. This, indeed, is Downs's own method. But he does not use it with sufficient rigor. He begins by making assumptions he has no need to make. A party's maneuvers as it endeavors to maximize political
support,
its
facts,
to bring the
reasons for choosing one policy rather than another
which it committed— all
in the course of this endeavor, the circumstances in
risks losing
support by abandoning policies to which
this
it is
can be
explained with nothing said about the private ambitions of party leaders or the unremitting selfishness of man.
Downs makes yet another unnecessary assumption when he "The benefits voters consider in making their decisions [about how to vote] are streams of utility derived from government action." ^^ The context makes it clear that the benefits which the voter considers, though perhaps not confined to himself alone, are confined to him and to others closely connected with him, his family, his neighbors, and his companions at work. But, as Downs himself admits, the voter often cannot know how a policy, if carried out, would aflFect him and those close to him. It just is not true that the citizen, when he considers the policies of parties soliciting his vote, considers only those policies which he believes will affect either him personally or others whose lives and work are involved with his own. The citizen does, of course, have ambitions for himself which cannot help but include his family and close neighbors and may often be more concerned about policies which he thinks will affect these ambitions than about other policies. But he also has ambitions for his class or local community or race or country, or even for mankind, Professor
says that
18 Ibid., p. 36.
267
The
Social Sciences
which he cares about for other reasons than that their achievement would benefit him and others he cares for personally. Moreover, it is often easier for a man to see how a policy might aflFect his country or some other large group or community than to see how it might aflFect himself and those close to him.
Downs
is never more perceptive than when he tries to explain some persons have much stronger incentives than others to get politically relevant information, and are also much better placed to get it. These persons are unusually discriminating and foresighted in their assessments of parties and their policies, are better judges of how this or that policy might aflFect them and those close to them, and are
Professor
how
it
is
that
better able to exert pressure on political leaders. These are the citizens
who, though only a small minority of the state, can take eflFective political action deliberately. That is to say, they are so placed that whether what they do makes an appreciable diflFerence does not depend on a large number of other citizens, whose actions they cannot influence, also doing
it.
This minority of unusually
voters but as persuaders. to get information,
how
how
eflFective citizens are
Downs shows admirably how
not
it is
eflFective as
their interest
they are better placed than others to get
it,
and
party leaders and governments need to take particular notice of
what they say. But none of his ingenious explanations in any way depends on the assumption that citizens, when they vote or seek to persuade, are concerned only to maximize the benefits which they and those close to them stand to gain from government action. Downs, for the purposes of his model, need only have assumed that the citizen, as voter or persuader, has some goals which require government action if they are to be achieved and places these goals in a stable order of preferences. He had no need to say anything
about the nature of the goals or the benefits they bring.
American writers about democracy have taken special notice of the division of labor in politics and have sought to explain how the functions of voters, leaders, and persuaders in the democratic process diflFer. Such terms as "decision maker," "persuader," and "pressure group," and even "democratic process," widely used in America before British students of politics took them up, are evidence of this notice. The "process" is elaborate, and the actors in it— voters, parties, pressure groups, elected oflficials, permanent oflficials (civil servants), journalists and other providers of information and criticism— all have their distinct roles and their typical aims. Yet they are
all,
in their diflFerent
ways, decision-makers, or persuaders,
American scholars have devoted much time and thought to analyzing these roles, to explaining how they are related, and to making distinctions between the kinds of activities of which they consist. They aim at precision and realism, and quite often they achieve their aim. But sometimes they sacrifice realism in pursuit of theoretical neatness and simplicity. It is presumably because he thinks it makes his
or both.
268
John Plamenatz
model simpler
that
Downs assumes
that persuasion in the field of politics
never takes the form of trying to change other people's
"tastes."
The word
perhaps an odd one to use in this connection, but I take it that Downs has in mind wants or aims which the citizen already has before the political leader or persuader begins to work on him. The citizen, as "tastes"
is
Downs
imagines him, has a variety of goals, and government action
concern to him only to the extent that
is
of
promotes or impedes his achievement of them. Downs assumes that persuasion from political motives— that is to say, persuasion whose aim is to win political support or to exert political influence— never takes the form of trying to get anyone to give up some of these goals or to adopt others but aims only at inducing him to believe that
them
or will
some policy or party or candidate will help him to achieve it more difficult for him to do so. That is to say, political
make
persuasion, though to
it
it
may
in fact
change personal
goals, ^^
is
not intended
do so by the persuaders.
Why
does Downs make this assumption? Does the economic theorist, whose methods he wants to use to explain political behavior, make a similar assumption? Does he assume that the economic persuader— the advertiser— never tries to change the consumer's tastes but tries only to persuade him that the products he commends will be to his taste? For example, does the advertiser never aim at getting the consumer to drink coffee at breakfast, which involves his not drinking tea, but only at getting him to drink one brand of coffee rather than another? Our conceptions of our goals are often much hazier than we think they are until
we
consider what should be done to achieve them.
persuades us to set about achieving some goal one other
may
well change our conception of
realizing that he has
done
so.
it,
way
The man who
rather than an-
without either his or our
We may
come to understand what he has what happened when we made up
done to us only when we look back at our minds what to do. As often as not, in the real world, deciding on the means to an end is at the same time the acquiring of a definite end; and this is not the less so when we consult others or allow them to persuade us than when we consult only ourselves. This is a truth which experience attests daily, though it may be difficult to reconcile it with the economist's idea of what makes an action rational.
19
The word
personal,
which
is
mine and not Downs's, could be misleading
in this
context. Personal goals, in the sense here intended, are not necessarily benefits to the person whose goals they are, or to those closely connected with him. They are
personal only in the sense that no one acting from a political motive has deliberately induced him to have them. They are always largely effects of education, which may differ greatly from one type of political community to another, e.g., from the Soviet Union to Switzerland. But they are not intended effects of political propaganda, of persuasion deliberately undertaken to get citizens to support a political party or candidate for public office or a policy favored by such a party or by such a candidate.
269
The
Social Sciences
personal goals were crystal clear to him bebegan his work of persuasion, so that we could always distinguish in principle between inducing him to prefer one way of achieving them to another and inducing him to change them, it would still be difficult to see the point of Downs's assumption. No matter how clearly decisions as to means can be distinguished from decisions as to ends, the persuader seeking to maximize his own or his party's political support may stand to gain more by changing the citizen's personal goals than by persuading him that he is more likely to achieve them if he votes for one party or policy rather than another. If that is so, then the perBut, even
if
every
citizen's
fore the political persuader
who
suader
does not try to change, the
citizen's
personal goals
is
acting
Downs's sense of that word. It is by no means obvious that it is always easier to change a man's party allegiance or his preference for some policies over others than it is to change his personal goals. It may sometimes, perhaps often, happen that the easiest way of changing the constituent's party allegiance is by the changing of his personal goals. Political leaders acting on this beUef have sometimes been highly irrationally in
successful.
Downs assumes
that the ordinary citizen, the voter,
is
as rational as
the persuader; that his goals are no less clear to him, though he
wonder what
are the best political
doubtful,^^ but
man,
tional
as
we can Downs
means
let it pass, for it
to
may
them. The assumption
does not
aflFect
the issue.
The
is
ra-
conceives of him, knows what his goals are and
among them. But that does not make it irrational someone who seeks to persuade him to abandon some
his order of preferences
for
him
to listen to
of his goals in favor of others. is
equally rational
if,
when
Whether he
he he knows
listens or refuses to listen,
the time comes to
make
his decision,
what he wants and decides wisely in the light of the information available to him. It would be absurd to conceive of the rational man as the man whose goals never change, or who is never persuaded by others to change them. But if we allow that persuasion by others can move this rational
man to change his goals without his ceasing to be we assume that the persuasion offered to such a from
political
This,
I
rational,
why
should
person must not be
motives?
suggest,
is
Such a theory as Downs has conmakers of political decisions are ragoals are and their preferences among them
a mistaken belief.
structed need assume only that
all
knowing what their and making the decisions which, given the information available to them, are correctly designed to help them get what they want. It need make no tional,
20 The assumption is doubtful because we are comparing the personal goals of the mere citizen with the political goals of the leader. The party leader, for example, tries to get votes or other kinds of support for more or less well defined policies. He ordinarily has clearer ideas both about what he wants to achieve and about what he should do to achieve it.
270
John Plamenatz
how
come
have the goals they do have. must take into account the fact that every citizen's decisions are affected by the decisions, both actual and expected, of others. But this it must do, even though it makes the assumption that political decisions have no effect on personal goals; and it is by no means clear that such an assumption makes any easier the task of explaining how political decisions interact with and affect one another. Moreover, the assumption is pretty obviously false. assumptions about
Of
citizens
to
course, the theory, to obtain validity,
Political decisions do, in fact, affect personal goals.
The
political theorist
may have
another reason, besides the desire to
construct as simple a theory as possible, for
making
this
assumption.
It is
often said that the proper business of government in a liberal democracy is
not to improve the moral character of the citizen or the quality of the
life
he leads but simply to help him get what he wants out of
life,
vided he does so without harming others. This, suitably qualified, Certainly, a
way
government which
set
is
protrue.
about trying to improve the morals or
and preferences would not be democratic as democracy is understood in the West. There are today many governments in the world imposing great hardships on their the
of
life
of citizens regardless of their tastes
subjects in the attempt to bring "progress" to them.
The attempt nearly
always involves changing their values and their ambitions, avowedly for their
own
good, without allowing them to criticize their would-be bene-
them out of power. Such attempts can sometimes be The governments that make them are not undemocratic merely because they try to change people's ambitions and values. They are unfactors or to vote justified.
democratic because they forbid criticism of their own aims and methods and allow no one to compete with them efiFectively for political power and influence. When a government is liable to be voted out of power at the next elections and must put up with unrelenting criticism, it cannot go far in deliberately changing the ambitions and moral preferences of its subjects. It is only one persuader among others, and though its control of the governmental machine in some ways increases its ability to persuade, in other ways it decreases it. It is easily the most powerful of the persuaders but is only one persuader among many. Today almost every government is enormously more active than governments used to be, and its activities inevitably have a great influence on the beliefs and aims of its subjects. Yet this influence is not properly control unless the government can contrive that its subjects have the beliefs and purposes it wants them to have. The more it must compete with others for influence, the less it can do this. Moreover, where there are several persuaders competing for influence, the methods and style of even the most powerful of them are widely different from what they would be if he were the only persuader or if nobody else could exert influence openly except by his permission. A government's being democratic has nothing to do with its not attempt-
271
The ing to change
to
its
and moral preferences. We are means, and we do not cease leaders, even in the most liberal of
subjects' personal goals
much
persuaders as to ends as
all
Social Sciences
be so when we become
political
as to
democracies.
EXPLAINING THE PARTY SYSTEM Downs's model serves better than
matter
how
how
to explain
two-party systems function
much
multi-party systems do. Assuming that voters, no
how
different their political preferences, arrange policies on every important issue in the same order or "political scale" from Left to Right,
Downs shows how, where power and most
tively for
parties
competing
effec-
which are very depend upon the extent to which the
the interest of both parties to have programs
scale,
it is
much
alike.
two
two
there are only
voters support policies along one section of the
How much
alike will
moderate two programs. But if a
parties risk losing extremist support in the attempt to get
support.
The smaller
this risk, the
more
alike the
large proportion of the voters support policies along widely separate sections of the political scale, the
programs. Also, there will be
two
little
parties will
have widely different
incentive to form center parties be-
cause voters supporting moderate policies will be relatively few. The twoparty system works best where most voters support moderate policies,
and the system encourages political moderation. Downs's model explains why this should be so, and the evidence attests that it is so in the real world.
The model
is
much
less useful
when
it
party system operates. In this respect,
comes
it is
democracy, British as well as American.
to explaining
how
a multi-
like several other theories of
Political theorists in the
two
great English-speaking countries are too apt to believe that democracy
on a large scale works best where there are only two parties competing power. "If our reasoning is correct," says Professor Downs, "voters in multi-party systems are much more likely to be swayed by doceffectively for
trinal considerations
taken by
itself,
.
.
.
than are voters
in
two-party systems."-^ This,
does not suggest that a multi-party system works less well
than a two-party one, but in the general context of Downs's argument
show
it
moment. But before I do that, I want to challenge the general statement that where there are more than two political parties competing for popular support, voters are likely to be more affected by doctrine and ideology than where there are only two such parties. Two-party democracy is more or less confined to the English-speaking does suggest
peoples.
I
21 Downs,
it,
as
shall not
u)). cit., p.
I
hope
to
in a
argue that doctrinal or ideological disputes are espe-
127.
272
John Plamenatz daily prominent
among them. 2- They may
well be more prominent in
some countries which are multi-party democracies than they are in any country where the native tongue is English. But in other such countries— for example, in Scandinavia— these disputes are no more prominent, no more widely indulged in, than they are in Britain. Moreover, it by no means follows that where doctrinal disputes are specially prominent, voters are proportionally more influenced by them. It is often said that the French are much given to such disputes, and that the Americans are not. Yet in France, as in the United States, the people
who
indulge in these disputes are a small minority. They are mostly to be
found
in
made by
academic and
literary circles.
political leaders
considerable, or
it
may be
Their influence on the decisions
and by voters small. It
is
may be
difficult to assess. It
not
much
may be
greater in France
in America. The French are among the more socially conservaWestern peoples, and French voters look for favors from the candidates they vote for no less than American voters do. Pressure groups are as active and influential in France as they are in America, and their demands take no less for granted the survival of the established order. The French citizen, when he decides how to vote, is at least as interested as the American in what he and those close to him stand to gain if he votes for one party or candidate rather than another. He is no more apt than the American voter to disregard this gain from "doctrinal considerations." He is as much as any citizen of a democracy a "rational voter," in the sense in which Downs uses the term. There are, of course, reasons why,
than
it is
tive of
in a country as socially conservative as France, ideological disputes should
excite intellectuals so
much and
the
Communist Party should
get so large
a vote from citizens not seriously interested in transforming the social
which only the historian can provide. Downs's no assistance here.
order, but they are reasons
model
is
of
Professor
Downs
says that "rational voting in a multiparty system
is
22 In all countries, not excluding the United States, doctrine has a profound influence on the citizen. Children born in America are not born liberal and democratic any more than are children born in France; they have to be suitably indoctrinated. In America there may be fewer disputes than there are in France about what children should be taught to believe, fewer disputes about "fundamental"' doctrines. On the other hand, in America as in France, there are many disputes, some of them rousing strong passions, about policy. These disputes are also, in a sense, doctrinal. The parties to them appeal to principles in support of the policies they favor, and quite often they disagree about the principles and not only about how to apply them. Nor are the principles in dispute always less than "fundamental," even in America, especially when the disputes concern the treatment of Negroes or other minorities.
These disputes about policy are everywhere of special concern to intellectuals, like to point to the principles involved in them and to argue about the principles. Everywhere "doctrinal considerations" are important, at least among the politically active, even where the political system and the principles inherent in
who
it
are not
much
challenged.
273
The both more
Social Sciences
and more important than in a two-party system. It is because the possible outcomes are more numerous, and it may not be clear to a voter just what his ballot is supporting when he casts it. Yet each vote is more important because the range of alternative
more
difficult
difficult
policies is likely to be much wider than in a two-party system [where] both parties oflFer relatively moderate platforms."-*^ If the citizen in this system is to use his vote rationally (i.e., in the way best calculated to maximize the benefits he derives from governmental action), he must, .
according to Downs,
know what
under a variety of circumstances,
coalitions
how
likely
stances rather than another will arise,
.
likely to enter set of
circum-
and what compromise program
any coalition it may enter. The citizen knowledge is inclined to allow doctrinal considerations weigh more heavily with him and therefore not to vote rationally.-^
each party
is
unable to get to
each party is it is that one
.
Downs policies
is
is
likely to accept in
this
probably mistaken in believing that the range of alternative wider where there are many parties than where
significantly
there are two.
Where
parties are
many,
it is
those that are moderate, and
not the extreme ones, which form coalitions and governments, and the
range of policies among them is often no wider than it would be if there were only two parties competing eflFectively for power. But why assume, as Downs does, that in a multi-party system the citizen, considering how his vote to increase his chances of benefiting from what and governments do, should take notice above all of party policies and likely coalitions and compromises between parties? Might he not be better advised to take account of what the candidate he votes for could do for him and his like? To consider on what committee of the legislature the candidate is likely to sit if he is elected? Or how much influence he will have in it, or on this or that government department or agency? These, surely, are questions that the rational voter of Downs's model ought to put to himself. And is he not as likely to put them, and to be able to answer them, in a multi-party democracy as in a two-party democracy? Downs's model does establish that it is extraordinarily difficult for the citizen in a multi-party democracy to decide how he should use his vote to increase his chances of getting the government he prefers. But to es-
he should cast legislatures
23 Downs, op. cit., p. 148. 24 Downs, in the seventh chapter of his book, admits that it can be rational for the citizen to vote for a party on ideological grounds, provided he has good reason to believe that its ideology indicates that in general it supports policies advantageous to persons like himself. In this way the citizen can (p. 98) "save himself the cost of being informed on a wider range of issues." But this applies to him as much in two-party as in multi-party systems. Downs, when he says that in a multi-party system the citizen is more "swayed by doctrinal considerations," does not suggest that this is so because ideology is then a better indicator of what makes for his advantage; he suggests rather that, hard put to it to make a rational use of his vote, the citizen votes from doctrinal considerations.
274
ak
John Plamenatz tablish this
is
not to
show
that he
is
worse placed than he would be
in a
two-party democracy to use his vote effectively to increase his chances of deriving benefits from government action.
doubt whether the French than the American voter, not to speak of the British voter, though Britain comes a good deal closer than does the United States to having a two-party system, if party is defined, as Downs defines it, as a team of leaders agreed about what policies voter
was
(or
is)
worse placed
I
in this respect
to pursue.
Since 1870 the French have been
much
system than the Americans or British to
less
theirs.
attached to their political
They have had,
until quite
and also a multiplicity of parties, most of them weakly organized. They have suffered from what is called "political instability." Yet I see no reason to believe that, as compared with the Americans or the British, they have been either less efficiently governed, if efficiency is measured by the extent to which government action helps citizens to achieve their ambitions, or less well recently, a long succession of short-lived governments,
placed to cast their votes rationally, defines
it.
If
if
rationality
is
defined as
Downs
the French have good reasons for being less attached to their
system than the Americans and the British to theirs, Downs's model throws no light upon them. Dahl and Lindblom's book deals with a wide variety of topics and in that sense is more ambitious than Downs's. In another sense, it is less ambitious; it does not aspire to explain so much on so few assumptions. It is a less immediately challenging book, though there is much to be learned from it and a good deal to criticize. In their first chapter Dahl and Lindblom say that they "hope to uncover large areas of agreement and, incidentally then, to put an end to sterile controversy over slogans
political
that hide agreement." This
is
only one of their purposes, but
it is
portant purpose which they largely achieve. For example, they
mirably still
how
hotly argued at the time that their
who
ad-
the issue of public ownership against private enterprise,
book appeared,
not a false issue, a battle of slogans which
persons
an im-
show
use them. They show, too,
be when
how
is
more often than
mean nothing misconceived
precise to the
much
criticism
They explain the role of the expert and its limitations extremely well. They make a useful distinction between two types of organization: those whose policy decisions are primarily responses to changes in price, and those whose policy of bureaucracy turns out to
it is
closely scrutinized.
decisions are responses to instructions from a superior authority or to pref-
They call the first kind enterprises and the second agencies. Both enterprises and agencies can be public or private, and it often matters little which they are. Their functions and also the
erences expressed by voting.
methods and standards of the men who run them often depend much more on their being enterprises or agencies than on their being private or public. Dahl and Lindblom do not claim to have new things to say 275
The
Social Sciences
about every matter they discuss, but there can be few books with so points in them that are well taken about so wide a variety of
many
which are either exercises of authority or ways of controlling by others. Dahl and Lindblom are better at describing organizations and how they operate than they are at stating their basic assumptions and defining the concepts they use. Men and women, they say, have "prime goals" or things which they desire for their own sake. These prime goals diflFer considerably from person to person, from class to class, from country to country, even in the West. And yet in the West there is wide agreement about the importance of certain "instrumental goals" because under Western conditions they are found to contribute generally and greatly to the attainment of prime goals. As Dahl and Lindblom admit, these instrumental goals soon come to be valued for their own sake and not only as means. Perhaps they would agree that when this happens, they have a marked effect on "prime goals"; that the private or nonpolitical ambitions of convinced liberals and democrats, and even of people without strong political convictions brought up in a liberal and democratic country, tend to differ considerably from those of people with other political convictions or brought up in a different type of political community. But though they might agree with this, Dahl and Lindblom take little account of it in their book, whose purpose, as they describe these it, is to examine the social processes which serve to maximize instrumental goals or values "whenever scarce resources are significantly activities its
exercise
involved."^'*
POLITICAL FREEDOM
Dahl
and Lindblom mention seven such
goals,
but
I
shall discuss
only two: freedom, and the one they call democracy or political equality.
They
define these
two goals
in
ways which may well
doubts in the reader's mind. Freedom, they say,
is
obstacles to the realisation of desires."-^' Unfortunately,
think
it
enough
to tell the reader that this
mind, the only freedom which
is
raise
"the absence of
they do not
the freedom they have in
one of the seven crucial political goals Western type. They find it necessary to argue that certain other definitions of freedom ought to be rejected. Thus their point is not that freedom, in any of these other senses, is not the freedom which is their concern, but rather that people who speak of freedom in these other senses have ideas about it so vague as or values in a
democracy
is
of the
25 Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom,
Torchbook 26
edition), p. 54.
Ibid., p. 29.
276
Politics,
Economics, and Welfare (Harper
John Plamenatz be of little use to the political scientist. They discuss three definitions of freedom diflFerent from their own and dismiss them as unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. Their arguments are brief and unconvincing and also largely irrelevant, and I need not consider them here.^^ But they do at least move the reader to think about freedom and their definition of it, and to ask himself whether freedom, as they define it, ought to be reckoned among the seven "instrumental goals" that the Western peoples have come to value. Why should this sort of freedom be of greater concern to, say, the Americans or the French than to the Chinese or the Bantu before Asia and Africa began to be touched by Western to
influences?
Are we really to believe that people
in the
West,
when
they speak
passionately (as they so often do) of the need to preserve and enlarge
freedom, have in mind merely getting rid of obstacles to the realizing of their desires?
too
little
little
for
When
freedom,
they complain that certain other peoples care are
they really accusing them
concerned about such obstacles?
No
doubt,
of
being too
men who have
desires
usually like to be rid of obstacles to their realization, but this
more
is
no
them when they
live "under Western conditions" than At least, we have no good evidence to the contrary. It quite often happens that a man wishes he were free— in another quite usual and perfectly intelligible sense of the word— of a desire he is ashamed of or which gets him into trouble or prevents his achieving an ambition close to his heart. Such a man may even be thankful that there are external impediments to reinforce his self-restraint. Though by freedom we often mean the absence of obstacles to our desires, we as often mean something else. For this is only one freedom among others. The liberal who wants freedom enlarged is not asking that in general there should be fewer obstacles to desire. If we take freedom as Dahl
true of
when they do
not.
may well be true that a slave is more democracy. If he has only desires "proper to his station," he may find fewer obstacles in his way than the citizen who boasts that he is no slave but a free man. In that case, it is quite proper to say that, in at least one sense of the word, the slave is more free than the citizen. But it is not proper to say that the boasting citizen is speaking absurdly. In another sense of the word, it is he who is free and Lindblom define
it,
then
it
free than the citizen of a liberal
and not the slave. And this, surely, is the sense of the word relevant to Dahl and Lindblom's purpose, which is to explain how a liberal democracy functions; this and not the sense they define. Freedom, as they define it, might perhaps be better secured in some such country as Aldous Huxley described in Brave New World. The freedom that liberals and democrats care about is a matter of 27
Ibid., pp.
30-32.
277
The rights
be
and opportunities, often
difficult to define. Admittedly, it cannot people desire to exercise these rights and to
fully realized unless
take these opportunities,
doing
Social Sciences
so,
but
this
and unless there are no obstacles
does not
mean
that
it
is
to
their
adequately defined as an
absence of obstacles to the realization of desire. Dahl and Lindblom say that they take their definition of freedom from Bertrand Russell's essay "Freedom and Government." They could have borrowed it from Jeremy Bentham or from Hobbes-^ or, no doubt, from any one of several other equally reputable sources. It defines a very usual, and a very useful, sense of the word, but one of not much use to the political theorist, though political theorists have been too often attracted to it. Perhaps they have liked its simplicity and its not being a moral term. But, after all, man is a moral being, and his desires do not enjoy parity of esteem with him. He cares much more about some than about others, not because they derive from stronger natural appetites, but because they are involved in his conception of a life worth living. The animal whose behavior concerns the political theorist is the most inhibited of animals, and the only one that aspires to freedom. Inevitably, Dahl and Lindblom cannot use the word freedom consistently in the sense of their definition, for that sense is not adapted to their purpose. Thus, in
get
one place-^ they say that a
what he wants unless he can
man
often cannot
"control" the actions of others,
and
they go on to suggest that his being free involves his being able to control others in certain respects. But a man's being able to get
he wants with the help of others
is
of obstacles to his realizing his desires; at least not unless the
obstacle
is
used
what
not the same thing as a mere absence
in a peculiar sense
which
is
not morally neutral.
word
When
we say that one man puts obstacles in the way of another, we ordinarily mean either that he interferes with the other man in such a way as to prevent his getting or doing what he wants, or that he
when he ought to do so and who does not go to the help
the help
is
fails to
help him
a condition of success.
who needs
A man
but is not entitled to it can hardly be said to be putting obstacles in his way. If my rich neighbor who owes me nothing and barely knows me were to give me a thousand dollars, I could get something I very much want, but of another
his help
ought not to say that he prevents my getting it by not giving me I have no right to expect of him. By one man's being an obstacle to another, we must mean, in this context, either his interfering, rightfully or wrongfully, with the other, or else his wrongfully failing to help him. If, like Dahl and Lindblom, we want to define freedom as the absence of obstacles to desire without recourse to moral terms, we must use the
I
what
28 See GBWW, Vol. 23, p. 86c. 29 Dahl and Lindblom, op. cit.,
p. 117.
278
John Plamenatz
word
obstacle,
when we apply
it
human
to
behavior, to refer only to
For otherwise we have to say that a man is deprived of his freedom whenever he wants something which he cannot get because there is no one around to help him get it. We have to say, for example, that Robinson Crusoe on his island, still having the wants but no longer the means of a civilized man, was deprived of most of his freedom till Man Friday appeared to restore a part of it to him by becoming his servant. The freedom that liberals and democrats care about is notoriously difficult to define. It is not one freedom but several closely related to one another in the sense that none is much worth having without some of the others. A man is free if he can speak his mind, within certain limits, about those in authority over him and anything else that awakens his interest. He is free also if he can form or join organizations to achieve purposes which he wants to see achieved, again within certain limits. He is free if he can compete with others on equal terms (terms sometimes active interference.
extraordinarily difficult to define) to get the kind of education or the
kind of work he wants. decide
who
He
are to be the
policy in his community.
He
is
free
if
supreme
he can vote
legislators
at elections
and makers
which
of public
he is not liable to arbitrary arrest and punishment. There are other freedoms besides these. Each of these freedoms is difficult to define precisely because to define it is to define is
free
if
the conditions of its realization. Dahl and Lindblom discuss some of the most important of these conditions with admirable good sense and so make a really considerable contribution to our understanding of the freedoms that Western democrats care about. But their definition of what they take to be the basic or primary sense of freedom is no help to them at all when it comes to explaining why certain specific rights and opportunities are held to be so important by liberals and democrats in the West. Westernized peoples do have goals which are peculiar to them, or which they care about much more than other peoples do. To be able to pursue these goals effectively, they need certain opportunities and rights; they need to make claims which other peoples do not make and to have the claims recognized. These are the claims we must look at if we want to discover what the freedom is which, under Western conditions, is an important means to the achievement of what Dahl and Lindblom call prime goals. They call them "prime" because they think of them
own
as desired for their
which are valued call
as
sake. But, as they are careful to admit, things
means can
also
be valued
as ends.
instrumental are also prime goals; and this
freedom. Freedom,
when
it
becomes
is
The
goals they
especially true of
a prime goal, deeply affects other
such goals. Or, to say the same thing in other words, there are, among the ends to which freedom is a means, many which people would not
279
The
Social Sciences
strive for unless they had come to value freedom for its own sake. Among Western peoples, cerfain kinds of freedom are essential means to their achieving their ambitions very largely because they are the ambitions
of persons
who
must appear
care deeply for just those kinds of freedom, or
do so
who
be tolerable to their neighbors. This is an important point to which thinkers in the utilitarian tradition pay too little attention, when they do not ignore it altogether, and 1 should therefore like to enlarge upon it. Wants are multiplied and changed by the very activities which aim at satisfying them more economically or more fully. As everyone knows, technical progress adds continually to our wants. But this, presumably, happens as much in an authoritarian as in a democratic society, as much in the Soviet Union as in the United States. Russia is much more industrial, urban, and literate now than she was fifty years ago and is therefore in many ways more like America than she used to be. Economic and other social conditions are in important respects more like American conditions, and the wants and preferences of Russians more like those of Americans. To use the idiom of Dahl and Lindblom, the prime goals of Russians and Americans probably diflFer less now than they used to do in the days of Wilson and Lenin. So, too, in some respects, do their administrative practices, their schooling, and their cultures. These two great peoples, whose wealth and power have grown so rapidly, are in many ways more alike than they used to be. Is freedom— not the sort that Dahl and Lindblom define but the sort that they and countless other Americans value— a means to the achievement of goals common to Russians and Americans? Or is it a means only to the achievement of goals which the Americans share with other Western peoples but not with the Russians? If it is the first, then the Russians would be better off for having a democracy of the Western type. If is
it is
to
to
the second, they
to say, granted that
what
is
would be no
better
off.
ultimately desirable
is
No
better
off,
that
that "goal achieve-
ment" should be "maximized." Dahl and Lindblom say that freedom under Western conditions is an instrumental goal. But they do not make it clear what conditions they have in mind. We must suppose that an industrial economy, large towns, literacy, the
emancipation of women, the spread of science, technology,
do not make up these conditions, for they are common to the Soviet Union and the United States. In some of the ways in which the Americans have been making rapid progress, the Russians have come closer than, say, the British have to keeping pace with them. Yet Western conditions, presumably, are shared by the Americans with the British
and
so on,
rather than with the Russians. Wliat then are these conditions,
common
if
they
Union and the United States? What do the Americans share with the British which they do not share
exclude what
is
to the Soxiet
280
John Plamenatz with the Russians? certain
some
What
is
it
but the value the Americans put upon Upon freedom and
opportunities and rights and obHgations?
of the other things
Dahl and Lindblom
that
call
instrumental
goals? Industrial
and
more
efficient
aspirations to societies,
It
techniques of
perhaps, be argued that
it
more than just change and more than widespread literacy and management and administration. It could,
progress does
scientific
multiply material wants.
brings
gives birth
to,
freedom which can be
or at least strengthens, certain
developed industrial democracies of the Western type. If this argument
only in
realized, in
were sound, it would follow that there was a case for introducing that type of democracy into countries that have become industrial, urban, and literate. Nobody, to my knowledge, has yet put together a wellconsidered argument of this kind, though I see no reason why it should not be done. I suspect that there is a case for saying that liberal democracy is better suited than any other form of government to communities which are industrial, highly literate, and socially mobile, because the people who live in them acquire certain liberal aspirations. But Dahl and Lindblom make no attempt to argue in this way; and, in any case, such an argument would turn on freedom's being much more a prime than an instrumental goal.
POLITICAL EQUALITY Another L
of their seven
political equality.
instrumental goals they call democracy or
They say
of
it
that
it is
twofold. "It consists of a
condition to be attained and a principle guiding the procedure for attaining
it.
The condition
is
political
which we define
equality,
as
governmental decisions is shared so that the preferences of no one citizen are weighted more heavily than the preferences ."^^ I doubt whether of any other citizen. The principle is majority rule. this definition serves the purpose of its authors which is presumably to make it clear what conditions must hold if political equality is to be achieved. Economists sometimes speak of the weighting of preferfollows: Control over
.
.
and this translation of a term they use into the study of politics perhaps intended to bring to that study the greater precision of a sister science. The intention is good but in this case does not succeed.
ences, is
When we
say that every citizen should have only one vote, or that
there ought to be the or (where there
is
same number
of electors in each electoral district,
proportional representation) that a candidate
provided he gets a given proportion of the votes clear principles. It
30
is
possible to
make
Ibid., p. 41.
281
cast,
we
is
elected
lay
down
elaborate rules for apportioning
The
Social Sciences
where voters are free to express second, third, and further preferand good reasons can be given for preferring some of these rules others. But these rules prescribe only how votes are to be distributed
votes
ences, to
among
citizens, or electors
among
electoral districts, or
how
preferences
and counted. The rules can be precisely stated because it is clear what is being distributed or counted. But what can be meant, in a representative democracy, by the principle that control over governmental decisions is to be so shared that the preferences of no one citizen are weighted more heavily than those of another? What rules about voting and indicating preferences, and about the counting of votes and preferences, would implement this principle? In a direct democracy, where the citizens themselves take governmental decisions, it might be possible in theory to work out an elaborate set of rules prescribing how proposals of law were to be made and debated, how citizens were to express their preferences among them, and how the preferences were to be counted, and then to justify the rules on the ground that they ensured that the preferences of no citizen willing to express preferences counted for more in the making of decisions than the preferences of any other equally willing citizen. But Dahl and Lindblom have in mind not direct but representative democracy. This is why they speak of the citizens controlling governmental decisions and not of their are to be expressed
taking them.
How shared
can some people's control over other people's decisions be so the controllers that the preferences of no one controller
among
when
count for more than the preferences of any other, the decisions are the representatives
the makers of
and not the delegates
of the con-
such a case, do the preferences relate to? Do they relate to proposals of law and policy? But most citizens have no such preferences, or express none. If they could express them, and if it were trollers?
What,
in
would ensure more than those of another, would the citizens not be better served by a computer than by an assembly of elected representatives? The elaborate rules sometimes made, laying down who has the right to vote, how he shall cast his vote and indicate his preferences, and how votes and preferences are to be counted, are meant to ensure that, as far as possible, the preferpossible to devise rules for weighting their preferences that that the preferences of no one citizen counted for
ences of every voter count for as
much
who
be a maker
is
to hold office,
cannot, and are not
who
meant
is
to
to,
as those of
any other
in deciding
of official decisions.
ensure that every citizen has as
control as any other over the decisions that are taken. Indeed,
it
They
much means
democracy having equal speak of them as having an equal influence or an equal say, unless, of course, we so define the equal sharing of control over official decisions that it consists merely in the nothing to speak of citizens
in a representative
shares in this control, any
more than
282
to
John Plamenatz
how the makers we cannot appeal
operation of certain rules prescribing are to be elected. But, in that case, that control over such decisions
must be equally shared
of the decisions to the principle to help us decide
what the electoral rules should be. Dahl and Lindblom admit that we can never fully achieve what they call political equality, and they claim only that we can come indefinitely closer to achieving it. But how can we know that we are getting closer to a goal, even though we concede that we cannot achieve it, unless we know what would constitute a full achievement? The formula that Dahl and Lindblom provide does not give us this knowledge, either completely or partially. Students of politics agree that free elections always have considerable effects
on the policy decisions of governments, though
it is
often impossi-
ble to predict these effects or even to ascertain later just
much more
were. But policy decisions are affected by actual and anticipated, of elections.
They
are affected also
when
groups. Dahl and Lindblom,
of pressure
what they
than the
by
results,
the activities
they discuss popular
control over governmental decisions, no doubt have these activities in
mind
just as
much
as elections. Quite rightly, they think
it
important
democracy there should exist a wide variety of organizations promoting the interests and expressing the beliefs of citizens. The more extensively and diversely citizens are organized to achieve aims which they share, the less easy for governments to intimidate or deceive them or to neglect their interests and beliefs. These that in a representative
organizations, since they support rival leaders,
make
the competition
on which democracy depends, more widespread and more orderly. They also make easier the emergence of new leaders, for the
for power,
more
of
them there
are, the
more ladders
for the ambitious to climb.
Again, the more of them there are, the greater the chance that a citizen will
belong to several, so that he
is
united with some people for some
purposes and with others for others. The wider the range of a
group
home
activities, the
him
broader his sympathies, and the more
and
it
is
citizen's
brought
compromise are to everydemocracy by spreading information and making possible the countless bargains and exchanges of views which ensure, on the one hand, that governments take account of the needs and wishes of citizens and, on the other, that citizens have some understanding of the difficulties that face their rulers. Dahl and Lindblom, like other American theorists of democracy, and better than to
that tolerance
a readiness to
one's interest. Pressure groups strengthen
most, explain the crucial importance to representative government, as operates in the West, of the exerting of an
pressures and the striking of innumerable bargains.
they say,
is
above
all a
maker
of bargains; he
a giver of orders. "Most of his time
is
283
it
immense variety of organized is
consumed
The
political leader,
much more
that than
in bargaining. This
is
The
Social Sciences
the skill he cultivates; it is the skill that distinguishes the master-politician from the political failure." "^^ Democracy has been called government by discussion. It could as well be called government by negotiation and bargaining. Nor are the two descriptions equivalent. A debate that is brought to an end by a majority decision is a discussion but is not negotiation and bargaining.
Were
it
not for the pressure groups, the political leader in the
could not be the bargainer that he
is.
West
Moreover, pressure groups do
more than promote interests and express beliefs which citizens already have. They also help to create and to diflFuse interests and beliefs. Citizens who join them acquire aims, loyalties, and opinions they did not have before, while governments acquire masses of precise and relevant information they would otherwise lack. admirable but can be said without recourse to the idea of such a way that no one's preferences count for more (or are weighted more heavily) than anyone else's. This formula makes no sense in a representative All this
is
political equality as a sharing of control over decisions in
democracy, whether the preferences are those of individuals or of groups. is an empty formula. No less empty than saying— as theorists of
It
democracy so often do— that organized groups should be able
to exert
influence on the government in proportion to their size or the urgency
who speak in way, having once admitted that neither influence nor the urgency of needs nor the intensity of beliefs can be measured "exactly," then go on to take it for granted that they can be measured "roughly." But they of their needs or the intensity of their beliefs. Theorists this
how even the roughest of measurements are to be made Because we can often say, in some particular context, that one man or one pressure group has had more influence than another on certain decisions of policy, it does not follow that we can establish criteria for measuring political influence generally, no matter who the man or group exerting the influence or what the nature of the decisions which the government takes. So, too, because we can often say, in a particular context, that the needs or beliefs of some man or group of men are more urgent or more intense than those of another, it is by no means clear that we can measure, even though "only roughly," all needs and beliefs that affect the kinds of decisions that governments take. Everyone readily concedes that exact measurement is impossible, but there are many who fall back on the assumption that some kind of rough measurement can be made. After all, they say, men do have preferences among their wants and are often able to argue, quite reasonably, that some needs are more urgent or some beliefs more deeply held than others. Among the kinds of judgment continually made in everyday life, none fail to
explain
in practice.
31 Ibid,
Y>.
333.
284
John Plamenatz
more important than the kind which
is
"urgent" or
more
"intense." This
that all politically
is
some needs or some because they are more
asserts that
should take precedence over others
beliefs
perfectly true but
is
not good evidence
relevant needs or beliefs are commensurable or can
be placed in order on the same scale. I suggest that nearly everything that
is
really valuable in Politics,
Economics, and Welfare— ^nd there is a great deal of it— could be said adequately without any talk of maximizing goal achievement. Indeed
much
of
it
could be said more adequately, in the sense of more simply
we
democracy wants (or the achievement of goals), we find ourselves faced time and again with insoluble problems and resorting to vacuous sentences in the vain attempt to solve them. These democratic processes are often more simply, clearly, and credibly explained as serving to implement rights or conceptions of justice or to realize other principles which can be defined precisely without recourse to any formula of the kind favored by economists or Utiliand
precisely. If
as serving to
try to explain the processes peculiar to
maximize the
satisfaction of
tarians. If
we want
to justify the principle that every citizen
right to vote at elections so organized
much
vote will count for as are elected to the
supreme
for political equality
is
that, if
should have the
he troubles to vote,
his
in deciding which candidates Dahl and Lindblom's formula For, since we do not know what sort of
any other
as
legislature,
useless.
evidence would establish that control or influence over governmental decisions
was equally shared
in the sense
of the formula,
determine whether or not elections organized in line with
would promote the equal
we
cannot
this principle
But the principle, unlike the formula, can be used as a guide to action. We can specify how votes must be cast and counted to ensure that every vote counts for as much as any other in deciding which candidates are elected, and we can aim at getting as close as circumstances permit to organizing elections on this principle.
We may
sharing.
not like the principle,
we may
prefer
some other
one that can be acted upon. It is, as American political theorists sometimes like to put it, operational. It is much more this principle than the formula put forward by Dahl and Lindblom that deserves to be called political equality or at least to be treated as one aspect of that equality. Another aspect might be the principle that every citizen has the right to form or to join organizations whose purpose is to promote interests principle to
it,
but
is
it
at least
others. Here again we have a principle can justify it on a number of grounds; we can point to the consequences of not acting upon it and argue that they are undesirable. We can be discriminating, precise, and realistic when
or beliefs
which
we
is
which he shares with
operational.
We
consider these consequences.
Our 285
refusal to speak of
maximizing
The "want
satisfactions" or "goal
ness or lack of realism. If
Social Sciences
achievement" does not condemn us to vague-
we
inquire into the social origins of these
and other such principles, we may find that they arose in large part because they were useful. But, more often than not, their usefulness does not consist in what they contribute to the achievement of something measurable. It just is not true that rules of right, whether they are rules of equality or freedom or justice, can always, or even often, be translated into rules for the attainment of something which can be defined without the use of moral terms and also quantified. The old theorists of democracy, whose explanations seem so vague and unrealistic to the new theorists, spoke readily of promoting justice, freedom, and equality, and never, except the disciples of Bentham, of maximizing anything. No doubt they were lacking in precision and realism, and some of them were much given to rhetoric and moralizing. But their defects were not due to their preferring the language of rights to the language of wants and preferences and goal achievement. They were due rather to their not knowing enough about political behavior. When they spoke of justice or freedom or equality, they often spoke vaguely. They did so, not because the use of moral terms condemned them to vagueness, but because they had only hazy ideas about the processes to which they applied the terms. By all means let us see to it that the principles and concepts we use to explain democratic processes are operational. Let us agree also that
we
cannot find such terms by simply making
new definitions. We cannot we study the behavior
renovate our concepts to good purpose unless
we hope
by using them. The formulation of suitable assumpand concepts and the close study of the processes to be explained by means of them necessarily go together. This does not require that a scholar who devotes himself to one of these tasks must devote himself equally to the other; he can concentrate profitably on one of them, provided he takes notice of the work of scholars who concentrate on the other. But let us not delude ourselves that the work of conceptual to explain
tions, principles,
revision involves discarding the language of rights for the language of interests, or
showing how principles of
justice or equality or
freedom
serve to maximize goal achiexement or anything else that can be defined
without using moral terms. As it is, our ideas of justice, equality, and freedom, vague though they may be in certain respects, are a good deal
vague than our ideas about preferences, interests, and goal achievement. We have used them longer and are more skilled in their use. Moreover, they are, just as easily as any other ideas we use to explain human behavior, adaptable to new and more sophisticated uses. They are as "hard currency" as any ideas at the disposal of the social scientist. Of course they are onl\' some of the ideas he needs, but he gains nothing by trying to conxert them into another and softer currency. less
286
John Plamenatz
To
explain the principles to which political behavior must conform
be reckoned democratic, as democracy is understood in the anywhere else, is not to advocate democracy or to moralize or to do anything unworthy of the political scientist, even if it should turn out that some of the most important of the principles are moral rules which cannot be translated into rules for achieving something that can be quantified. Explanation does not become advocacy merely because it involves defining moral rules and showing what kinds of behavior if
it
West
is
to
or
constitute observance of them.
being moral, nor
definition for
involved in observing
Such books
as
A
rule
is
it
not less susceptible of clear
is
more
difficult
to explain
what
is
it.
Dahl and Lindblom's
Economics, and Welfare account of a wide variety of
Politics,
are not only useful because they take
They moves the critical reader to inquire whether a coherent theory can be constructed on the assumptions they make and using the concepts they define. Dahl and Lindblom are deliberate and conscientious innovators who, in discarding old assumptions and ideas, point to the facts that seem to them to justify their doing so. Looking at their facts and their assessments of them, the reader cannot help but look critically at what they substitute for the ideas and assumpempirical studies in the attempt to construct a general theory. are useful also because this very attempt
One
tions they discard.
or other of their assumptions or definitions
may
mind as to just why he is dissatisfied with it precisely because he has come upon it in its place in a carefully worked out general theory which takes account of a large body of facts. If he had come across it in another context, apart from a theory not satisfy him, but he
is
clearer in his
many empirical studies, he might not have been might not have been able to explain why he found it unsatisfactory. Such books as Dahl and Lindblom's invite detailed criticism because they aim at being precise and realistic, and the critical reader is grateful because it is when he is stimulated to attempt such criticism that he learns most from what he reads. making
a careful use of
dissatisfied
with
it
or
CONSENSUS American and I.
as
it is
British political theorists
seem
to agree that
democracy,
practised in the West, requires that the people, or at least
the political leaders
who
enjoy their confidence, should not differ widely
they favor. Professor Dahl, in A Preface to Democratic Theory, speaks of an "underlying consensus on policy that usually exists
in the policies
in [a] society
bers." ^^
He
32 Dahl, op.
among
a
predominant portion of the
politically active
also distinguishes certain principles or rules that people
cit.,
p. 132.
287
memhave
The to
be agreed about
Hkes to
call
it)
if
Social Sciences
Western democracy (or polyarchy, as he sometimes from what he calls "policy goals."
to function properly
is
Since people can strive deliberately to maintain these principles, they too, speaking, are sometimes policy goals. Dahl distinguishes them from other such goals and then goes on to say that "polyarchy requires a relatively high agreement on both kinds of goals." In other words, if polyarchy or the Western type of democracy is to work smoothly, citizens generally or the politically active among them must agree broadly not only about the political system but also about the policies that governments ought to pursue. Students of politics in both America and Britain often point to the fact that in their countries two large parties get the support of the vast majority of electors and have policies which are much more alike than the strictly
'^'^
.
leaders of the parties
.
.
to believe. This affectation or pretense
aflFect
is
wel-
come. If democracy on a large scale is to work smoothly, it is desirable both that competition for power should be keen and that the policies of the successful party should not be abhorrent to the supporters of
defeated eyes of
One
rival.
champions,
its
Where
depends.
its
of the great virtues of "two-party" democracy, in the is
that
it
encourages the moderation on which
citizens differ greatly in their ideas of
a good, or at least a tolerable, society,
democracy
is
what
it
constitutes
unlikely to endure,
but where their ideas are sufficiently alike to enable democracy to work smoothly, its smooth working then helps to keep those ideas from diverging too much. This is a belief widely shared among students of politics in the United States and Britain, though the Americans give greater prominence to
it
and make bolder use
of
it
in constructing their theories of
democracy.
There
another belief closely allied to
is
by American and apathy
desirable
is
coauthors put ship and the
.
.
.
if it
does not go too
in Voting:
it
"Extreme
far.
this
.
.
.
Low
one which
also shared
As Professor Berelson and
interest goes with
interest provides
is
that political indifference or
could destroy democratic processes
community
shifts
British political writers:
if
his
extreme partisan-
generalized throughout
maneuvering room
for political
necessary for a complex society in a period of rapid change.
Com-
promise might be based upon sophisticated awareness of costs and returns —perhaps impossible to demand of a mass society— but it is more often induced by indifference. Some people are and should be highly interested in politics,
but not everyone
is
or needs to be.
Only the doctrinaire would
deprecate the moderate indifference that facilitates compromise." '^^
It
may
be that the writers have not chosen the words that express their meaning
33 Ibid., p. 79. 34 Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F.
Lazarsfelcl,
314-15.
288
and William N. McPhee, Voting, pp.
John Plamenatz exactly.
They say
that extreme interest goes along with extreme partisan-
and yet they think
ship,
interested in politics. It ately indifiFerent,
it
desirable that
some people should be highly
these people, presumably, and not the moder-
is
who maneuver and make
political shifts
and reach com-
promises. Are they, then, being highly interested, also extremely partisan?
Presumably
not.
Or
if
they are, then their being so does not prevent their
if anyone, have "the sophisticated awareness and returns" which is not to be expected of the generality of citizens, and it is they who get room enough to maneuver because the unsophisticated and ill-informed majority do not watch too closely what they do. Perhaps the authors of Voting, had it in mind to say something like this: Only a minority of citizens are likely to be sophisticated and wellinformed as well as keenly interested in politics, so that where most citizens are keenly interested, their passions and prejudices make it more difficult for the sophisticated and well-informed to become political leaders or to reach satisfactory compromises if they do become leaders. In other words, if the sophisticated and the well-informed are to be able to
reaching compromises. They, of costs
take effective action in the general interest, sophisticated
it
is
desirable that the un-
and ill-informed should be only mildly concerned with what
they do. I
suggest that neither of these beliefs— about the need for consensus
or the if
need
for political
apathy
in large-scale representative democracies,
they are to function smoothly— can be accepted without considerable
qualification.
Though
political writers
the second as well, there
two beliefs are logically them separately. About the need for one kind
The
political
who
hold the
first
belief often hold
no reason in logic why they should do so. The independent of one another, and I shall consider is
system that
we
of consensus, there can
be
little
question.
are concerned with, representative
democ-
racy on a large scale, does call for a considerable measure of sophistica-
from a politically active minority. In a primitive and largely illiterate community, it could happen that even persons in authority were quite innocent of anything deserving the name of political philosophy or ideology. They might have no conception of a whole system of government and therefore accept no principles on the ground that to reject them is to subvert the system. Everyone having authority would of course need to have adequate motives and beliefs to ensure his exercising it in traditional ways, and he would need to have some principles. But there might be no principles that all persons in authority accepted and recognized as essential to a system of government in which each of them had his part. It is not obvious that there must be, in this sense, a political consensus among persons having authority, if a system of government (or a structure of power) is to be stable. But in a large and literate community, some such consensus, at least among the politically active, probably is a tion
289
The
Social Sciences
condition of political stability, both
and when stand
it is
how
The
when
community
the
politically active minority
the political system works in the
way
is
authoritarian
need not under-
that a student tries to
but they must recognize some political principles as essento the proper working of the system. They must "accept" a political
understand tial
democratic.
it,
They need not all believe in it wholeheartedly, and some of them may even dislike it. But they must recognize it as an essential part of the system; they must expect to find their colleagues appealing to it and must sometimes appeal to it themselves in order to evoke in others ideology.
the responses they require
And, of course,
if
they are to carry out their
official duties.
"advanced" communities, the politically active include many more persons than actually hold public office; they include leaders of parties and pressure groups and a wide variety of people who spend a good deal of their time, on paper or by word of mouth, discussing
public
in all
aflFairs.
In highly industrial and literate countries, the politically active are
always a considerable and a varied minority; they must often deal with unforeseen and even unprecedented situations; they must show initiative
and think
for themselves. Just
because they have to be more enterprising
than holders of authority in custom-bound communities, the need to
se-
cure their loyalty is more keenly felt. But this loyalty cannot take the form of attachment to practices which continually change and must therefore be a "commitment" to principles deemed to be fundamental. It must be a commitment to an ideology, or to a political system or constitution held to embody an ideology. It must be a political consensus. In authoritarian countries, this consensus, though vocal and insistent, may well be If, then, by a political conless sincere than it is in democratic countries. sensus we mean principles both widely and sincerely held, we may be right in holding that a representative and liberal democracy depends for its proper working on such a consensus more than does any other form '^'^
of
modern government.
35
A
consensus is not less needed in authoritarian than in democratic countries, but matter less that it should be sincere. A political system can depend greatly for its smooth working on mere lip service paid to it. Indeed, many kinds of conit
may
ventional behavior, nonpolitical as well as political, depend largely on this service and would quickly disappear without it. Even a liberal democracy depends considerably on the lip service paid by all and sundry to liberal and democratic principles. No doubt, no political system could endure if nobody believed "sincerely" in the principles proclaimed by it. But we do not know how widespread the belief needs to be, nor how "sincere." For there are degrees of sincerity not easily defined. Wliat is more, we do not know how far lip service contributes to the smooth working of a system by helping to sustain sincere belief in its principles, and how far it contributes to this end apart from its effect on belief. It may be sheer prejudice to believe tliat a hberal democracy depends for its smooth working on a widespread and sincere belief in its principles more than does any other fomi of modern government; if this belief is prejudice, it is one I share.
290
John Plamenatz But what of a consensus which is not poHtical? There are theorists in West who imply that Hberal democracy stands in greater need of such a consensus than do other forms of government. They speak as if they beheved that a wide divergence of nonpoHtical aims and principles were more dangerous to democratic than to authoritarian government. Sometimes they speak ambiguously and their exact meaning escapes the reader, but at least they appear to be saying this. For example, Professor Dahl, speaking of what he calls "the underlying consensus on policy" among the politically active, says of it that it is "prior to politics, beneath it, enveloping it, restricting it, conditioning it."^^ The authors of Voting say that and the context makes "Political stability is based on social stability," it clear that the political stability they have in mind is a democracy that functions smoothly because it is acceptable to the great majority. The implication is that people whose social circumstances are alike tend to have similar political beliefs and preferences, and that a political system is stable largely because social circumstances change gradually. In a large and complicated society, the social circumstances of some groups will diflFer greatly from those of others. But where social change is gradual, so too is change in political beliefs and preferences, making it easier for the
-"^^
groups whose social circumstances diflFer to accommodate themselves to one another. It is, I suggest, misleading to speak of an "underlying consensus on policy" which is "prior to politics." In every society there are some important principles which can be defined without reference to any specifically political rights. There are ideals of justice or freedom or equality which include no such rights. Governments often aim at satisfying demands justified by an appeal to one or more of these ideals. When this happens, we have people using political means to achieve ends which are not political. But these ideals used to justify the pursuit by governments of nonpolitical ends, though they are logically independent of the political system, have often arisen along with it, or even after it. The ideals need not be, and usually are not, prior to the principles inherent in the political system in the sense that the principles come to be valued because they are means to realizing the ideals. For example, equality of opportunity, as people conceive of it in a Western democracy, can perhaps be defined adequately without reference to political rights. Liberal democracy may be both the political environment which favors the emergence of a certain idea of equality and the political means to realizing this idea, and yet the idea be logically independent of the political rights which
mark of a liberal democracy. The authors of Voting also say that
are the
36 Dahl, op. cit., p. 132. 37 Berelson et at., op. cit.,
political stability
p. 315.
291
is
based on
social
The
Social Sciences
is by no means clear what they mean by this. What are we to understand by social stability? The type of society in which the democ-
stability. It
racy studied by Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and
we compare,
McPhee
flourishes
is
not
static.
with certain other countries and say that it has been more stable socially than they have during the last hundred If
say, Britain
years, do we mean that it has changed less than they have? It may have changed less than Japan or Turkey has. But has it changed less than France has? It may be that its political system has changed less, but what
we
are considering
stability
is
now
is
not political but social stability. Clearly, social
not absence of change.
between
What
then
is it? Is it
a relative absence
have been because social inequalities have been smaller in Britain? Has it been because class and other group interests have diverged less? Both social inequality and the divergence of group interests are notoriously difficult to measure. We may say confidently of two social groups that they are unequal or that their interests diverge, and may say it also with no less confidence of two other groups, and yet hesitate to say of the first inequality or divergence that it is greater or less than the second. There is good evidence that Britain has been less a prey to bitter group conflicts in the last hundred years than France has but very little evidence that social inequalities and divergences of group interests have been smaller in Britain than of bitter conflicts
been fewer such
classes or other social groups? If there
conflicts in Britain
than in France, has
it
in France.
What
are
we
to
understand by
that political preferences remain
political stability? Clearly not the fact
unchanged over
a considerable period
no democratic country today could claim to be politically stable. Nor should we understand by it the unchanging character of the political system. In all advanced industrial countries, the political system changes rapidly. The United States and Britain are perhaps the most stable politically of the larger Western democracies, but both their systems of government have changed greatly even in the last thirty years. Political stability does not consist in the fact that a system of government changes slowly but rather in the fact that it changes constitutionally, or at least peacefully in ways acceptable to the people generally and especially to the politically active among them. The system of government has changed less since 1930 in some notoriously unstable South American republics than it has in the United States. The political scientist may perhaps make a clear distinction between of time. For, in that case,
and social stability, though he often neglects to explain But the layman seems either to use the two expressions indifferently, as if he meant the same thing by them, or else uses them to refer to different things which are both political. For example, speaking of France during certain periods of her history, he is as ready to say that she was socially as that she was politically unstable, without appearing political stability it
to his readers.
292
John Plamenatz
between two kinds of instability. Social instability, or lack of social harmony, as he speaks of it, seems to consist above all in the reluctance of groups in conflict to resort to legal and peaceful methods of settling disputes, or in their condemnation of these methods as unjust even when they find it expedient to resort to them. But these methods are political, and this reluctance and condemnation are as much indications of political as of social disharmony or instability. Or else his words suggest that, whereas social disharmony consists in this reluctance and to distinguish
condemnation, political instability consists in the use of illegal or violent methods of changing the political system or in the fear that such methods may be used. His words imply a distinction between social disharmony
and
political instability.
Yet social disharmony, as he speaks of
it,
consists
methods of reaching compromises or disputes between social groups— to something political. And, inis difficult to see what social harmony or stability could be if it
of certain attitudes to established settling
deed,
it
were not the absence of disputes"^'^ or the readiness to use established methods of settling them. Of these methods in a primitive community, where authority is still patriarchal, it could perhaps be said that they were not political, but it could hardly be said of them in the kind of community with which the authors of Voting are concerned. Social disharmony may be due less to a wide divergence between the aims and principles of social groups than to a widespread lack of confidence in methods of settling disputes and reaching compromises. Often, as a country becomes more prosperous and more literate, and political organizations multiply inside it, wants grow more quickly than the resources available to satisfy them, so that the disparity between wants and resources is greater than it used to be, even though the country is wealthier. The wants I have in mind here are not fantasies and secret ambitions but aspirations openly avowed because they are thought to be just, and which therefore move men to make demands on one another which they expect to be taken seriously. They may not expect to get all that they ask for, but they expect their demands to be taken into account, along with other demands, when settlements are made. Many of these demands cannot be satisfied except by political means and therefore inspire demands on the government. The more these demands exceed the resources available to meet them, the greater the concessions that have to be made willingly in order to reach compromises held to be just by the parties to them. My point might also be put in these words: If we find that in one country people are much less ready to reach compromises than they are in another, we must not attribute this lesser readiness to their having to
38 Sometimes the absence of disputes that
it
is
rarely so in technically
is due to apathy or despair or fear, but I assume advanced and highly literate communities which
are also liberal democracies.
293
The
make
greater concessions;
it
Social Sciences
might be due
methods or of confidence and attitudes.
of suitable political
appropriate
skills
to (juite other
causes— to a lack
in established
methods or
Professor Dahl speaks of a "consensus on policy" which he says
is
of
"prior
But policy, as we ordinarily speak of it, is a very political thing. Policy is what emerges from discussion and is reached by compromise; it is a product of political activity, whereas a "consensus prior to politics" suggests, not compromise decisions reached by discussion, but beliefs which most people hold about what is proper or just or reasonable or else attitudes that are widely shared even when those who have them do not know that they are. These beliefs, presumably, are not about the peculiar interest of this or that group but about forms of behavior held to be in the common interest. We need not assume that the beliefs are clearly formulated nor yet that there are no difiFerences of belief or attitude between individuals or groups; we need assume only that such differences are small. These, I take it, are the beliefs and attitudes which make up the consensus that Dahl speaks of, the consensus prior to politics. The consensus is prior to politics, presumably, in the sense that it makes possible, or at least makes easier, the negotiations and settlements of which politics so largely consists. What then is this consensus which makes negotiations and settlements easier? To what are the beliefs and attitudes which make it up directed? They are directed, I suggest, both to the demands that individuals and groups make upon each other and upon their rulers, and to the methods used to reach settlements when these demands conflict with one another or exceed available resources. The beliefs are about the justice of demands and the fairness of methods, and the attitudes are a readiness to act on those beliefs. But the methods are, as we have seen, largely political, and so the consensus must be so as well. It may be a consensus prior to politics but is nonetheless political for that. to politics."
It is prior to politics in one sense but not in another. The readiness to compromise which comes of the belief that established methods of reaching compromises are fair is itself in large part an effect of using the methods; it is therefore an effect of political activity. I do not suggest that men, whatever the methods they use, always come to believe in their fairness. Quite often they do not. They continually adapt their methods to their sense of what is fair or proper, but this does not prevent their sometimes getting into situations where they have no alternative but to resort to methods they dislike. I suggest rather that it is in the process of evolving and using methods of doing business with one another that men come to believe that the methods are fair, if in fact they do come to believe it. The consensus on which the survival of democracy depends is largely a product of democracy. It comes with the practice of democracy, though
this practice
is
a necessary, not a sufficient condition of
294
its
coming.
John Plamenatz
No doubt some and
to
does. It that
it is
about
kind of consensus
work smoothly, but
it
is
misleading to
call
prior to politics.
are inadequate
is
needed
if
democracy
misleading to speak of
it is
a consensus
it
on policy
is
to
endure Dahl
it
as Professor
if
you
also say of
it
suggest respectfully that Professor Dahl's ideas
I
and confused. This consensus
is,
admittedly,
diffi-
cult to describe, as several unsuccessful attempts at description prove;
and I daresay that my attempt is yet another failure. Nevertheless, there is something important here which calls for adequate description, something we have in mind when we say of a people that they are or are not capable of democracy.
POLITICAL APATHY
I
can see the need for some kind of consensus in a democracy, but I cannot see the virtues of political apathy. I cannot see why such
apathy should make for the smoother working of democracy. there
is
a great deal of
the oldest of
and
widespread
vious
is
that
Western democracies and not least in That Western democracy survives in spite indifference is obvious enough. What is not ob-
it
in all the
largest of them. political
it is
the better for
of the "passive" majority satisfactory
No doubt
make
it.
it
Why
should the relative indifference
easier for the active minority to reach
compromises?
Let us concede that there must be a relatively inactive majority and that they cannot help but be much less interested in politics than the active minority are. This, as the authors of Voting observe, effect of the division of labor. In all
is
an inevitable
but the most primitive communities,
some people who devote all, or a great part, of their working business of government and to ancillary "political" activities. This is both unavoidable and not to be deplored. There is much more to human life than mere government, and yet government will not be efficient unless there are some people who devote their working lives to it. The more complicated, socially mobile, and quickly changing a community, the greater its need for the services of such people. They are always a minority, though there are often more of them than are needed to carry there are
lives to the
out efficiently the services expected of them.
Now, it ment and
one thing to say that the people whose business is governand who are always a minority, the politically active, could often do their work better if there were fewer of them, and quite another to say that they do their work better because the rest of the people are not much interested in what they do. For the rest of the people, even if they were very greatly interested, would still not be politically is
politics,
active— at least not in the same sense as the persons whose activities were of absorbing interest to them. as in
Too many cooks
spoil the broth, in
France
England or America. But do the French, who are so much more 295
in-
The
Social Sciences
what
terested than the English or the Americans in
their cooks do, there-
fore fare worse?
Why
should what
and of artists be true of politicians? and can hardly be otherwise. To be really they must devote their working lives to their art, and is
false of cooks
Artists are also only a minority
good
artists,
others must devote themselves to other things.
anyone arguing that
artists
do
their
work
Yet
we
find
scarcely
better because the general
public care so little what they do. Artists are often, no doubt rightly, proud of not prostituting their talents and yet are also keen, no less rightly, to be appreciated, to get "recognition." This recognition is much more than a reward; it is also a stimulant which gives them the courage to make the most of their talents. Artists must not say what is expected of them or pander to conventional tastes, and yet they need to be understood, and listened to, by one another and by art-lovers who are not artists. Politicians do not stand to their public quite as artists do to theirs. They speak for them and not only to them. They are more immediately dependent on them, more quickly responsive to them, and more consciously manipulative of them. In all sorts of ways, relations between the "active few" and the "passive many" are different in the world of politics from what they are in the world of art. But I see no reason for believing that in either of these worlds the active few do their work any the better because the passive many are only mildly interested in what they do. Just as it is neither possible nor desirable that all men should be artists by profession, is
having the kind of interest in
art that professional artists have, so
neither possible nor desirable that
ticians
with a professional's interest in
a politician's interest in politics, they
would
also neglect their
that political apathy
is
a
own good
men
all
it
should be professional poli-
politics. If
ordinary citizens took
would be unbearably
businesses. But from this
it
frustrated
and
does not follow
thing. Professional politicians, as the authors
of Voting admit, are keenly interested in politics. This keen interest does
make them intolerant and unwilling to compromise. On the contrary, it helps to make them more realistic and supple, and therefore readier to make concessions in return for concessions made to them. Why then not
should the keen interest that ordinary citizens take
in
what
politicians
do
be supple and conciliatory? No doubt, when citizens sunk in ignorance and apathy are suddenly shaken out of their apathy by panic fears, they may behaxe in ways which make
make
it
it
more
difficult for politicians to
impossible for politicians to take reasonable decisions in the public in-
terest.
But
this
does not prove that apathy
is
a
that the
demands
different,
roused to a sudden interest in what
are dangerous.
The authors an interest
It
good
thing;
it
proves only
and expectations of the ignorant and habitually
pro\'es that
apathy
is
a
bad
the>'
know nothing
in-
about,
thing.
of Voting disapprove not only of citizens taking too keen
in politics
but also of their being too rational. "W^ere
296
all irra-
John Plamenatz tionality
and mythology absent, and
all
means,
rational selection of political
it
ends pursued by the most coldly is doubtful if the system would
hold together." ^^ Fortunately there is no great danger of too much reasoning in politics. For "voters are not highly rational; that is, most of them do not ratiocinate on the matter,
home
chase of a car or a
.
.
e.g., to
the extent that they do on the pur-
Nor do they attach
.
efficient
means
to ex-
plicit ends."^"
not clear what
It is
cinate. After
it is
that voters fail to
voting for a
man
do when they do not
or a party aspiring to office
kind of operation from buying a car or a home.
diflFerent
a car
all,
may know
just
what uses he wants
to put
it to,
and
is
A man just
ratio-
a very
buying
how much
he wants to pay for it. He cannot know in the same way just what he wants the man or the party he votes for to do if he or it gets elected. He cannot know in advance the situations in which the man or the party will
have
to act, the resources available, the relevant considerations to
be
taken into account. Choosing someone to take decisions on behalf of a
community
in
an uncertain future
altogether diflFerent from taking a
is
decision yourself. Admittedly, your choice of a candidate cision,
sions
but
it is
a decision diflFerent in kind both
your candidate will have to take
decision you take
when you buy
(though by no means
all)
a car.
will involve
he
if
is
Many
is
also a de-
from many of the decielected, and from the of his future decisions
comparisons of measurable benefits
and measurable costs; they will be decisions similar in kind to your decision when you buy a car. But your decision to vote for him in preference to other candidates
is
a decision of another kind.
You may
give
little
it or you may give a great deal, be the sort of "ratiocination" inthe careful purchase of a car. What do the authors of Voting
thought to the decision before you take
but however volved in
much you
give,
it
will not
have in mind when they say that the voter is not highly rational? Do they mean that the citizen ordinarily does not go about deciding whom to vote for in the same way as he goes about deciding what car or house to bu\ ? If they mean this, their judgment is misplaced. He is taking a diflFerent kind of decision and cannot make the sort of calculations he makes when he decides to buy a car. Or do they mean that he gives much less thought to deciding how he shall vote than he does to deciding what car to buy? This judgment, though it is perhaps mistaken, is not so obviously misplaced. I suspect that they mean both the one and the other without stopping to consider
how
the two
diflFer.
How to
can we discover whether or not a citizen gives as much thought deciding how he shall vote as to deciding what car to buy? If we put to
him questions which assume
39 Berelson et ah, op. 40 Ibid, p. 310.
that deciding
cit.
297
how
to vote
is
very like de-
The
Social Sciences
we shall probably conclude that he gives much conclusion will be of little value, unless the But our less thought to it. assumption on which our questions rest is correct. Why should we suppose that it is correct? Why should we accept the conclusion rather than challenge the assumption? If the questions we put to young men deciding whether or not to get married rested on the assumption that deciding to get married is pretty much like deciding to buy a car, their answers might soon convince us that they gave less thought to getting married than to buying a car. No doubt, deciding whether to get married is not like dewhat car
ciding
whom
to buy,
an election just as it is not like deciding what from this it does not follow that the two kinds of decisions car to buy. But from which it differs are alike. It may be that deciding whom to vote for at an election is not much more like deciding what car to buy than it is like deciding whether to get married. If that were so, it would be unreasonable to expect a man to go about deciding how to cast his vote as if he were deciding whether to buy something. Ideally, the citizen ought to prefer one policy to another on the ground that it is more likely to achieve something which he thinks desirable. In ciding
to vote for at
that case, his difficulty in
make
making a
"rational" use of his vote
is
only the
he would need to "ratiocinate" on the matter perhaps a hundred times as long as when he makes a wise purchase of a car. But if he did that, he would be devoting altogreater. In order to
gether too
much
The authors
Downs
time to
a rational use of
politics,
given that
it,
life
has other things to
offer.
of Voting are quite ready to admit this, just as Professor
when he
argues that it would be "irrational" for all but a few put themselves to the enormous trouble of getting the information required to make a "rational" use of their votes. Such paradoxes is
citizens to
more amusing than enlightening and are easily avoided by not taking too simple a view of what constitutes rationality. Are the political preferences of which the authors of Voting speak pref-
are
erences for one party over others? In that case, are "irrational" unless the citizens
it
is
who have them
not clear that they also
have policy or
other political preferences which are incompatible with them. But, to the extent that parties adopt policies which favor the interests of their
supporters and their supporters vote for them on the assumption that they do, citizens
who
are loyal to their party without looking too closely at
policies are not therefore "irrational." tional" at
if
how
Nor
are citizens necessarily "irra-
they favor the policies of their party without looking too closely
these policies affect their interests.
spare for politics, and
it
may be more
They have
a limited time to
reasonable for them to take
things on trust rather than to look into
would
its
them
many
as carefully as our authors
like.
What
is
rational
The economist
from one point of view may be
irrational
takes the consumer's wants for granted. But
298
from another. someone not
John Plamenatz an economist might point out to the consumer that he would be happier he had fewer wants and might try to argue him out of some of them.
if
His arguments might be excellent of their kind, and the consumer, if he were persuaded by them, might well congratulate himself on having become more ratior 1 than he used to be. But he would be neither more nor less rational from the mere economist's point of view, who is concerned with him only as a consumer or spender of money. I am not arguing that the voter in an "advanced" democracy like the United States or Britain is highly rational. I am arguing only that some of the reasons given for concluding that he is not are unconvincing. They are reasons frequently given in recent accounts of democracy, American and British, and the givers seem to think them important. So, too, I am not concerned to deny that the citizen devotes less thought to deciding how he shall vote than to deciding what kind of car or house to buy. I am concerned rather to say that the sort of reasons which would be good reasons for voting for one candidate or party rather than another are quite difiFerent from the sort which would be good reasons for buying one car rather than another. The rational voter, like the rational purchaser, must of course make comparisons and consider consequences, but what he compares and what he considers diflFer enormously.
Deciding to do something, as contrasted with acting on mere impulse, always involves making comparisons and considering consequences. The decision to build one kind of house rather than another because it is more beautiful involves this business of comparing
and considering no
less
than
does the decision to build one kind of house rather than another because it is
cheaper.
tastes differ is
The and
first it is
difiFerences in price.
make
it
decision
is
not less rational than the second because
not possible to measure differences in beauty as
The
fact that tastes differ
impossible to reach a decision, but
it
may
it
of course sometimes
does not warrant our saying
judgment of taste is somehow inherently less rational than one which involves no such judgment. A decision is rational when the maker of it takes proper account of whatever is relevant. The criteria of propriety and relevance are not the same for every kind of decision. In the case of some kinds of decisions— as, for example, those taken by the producer in a market economy— the criteria are fairly easily defined. In other cases, the business of defining them is altogether more difficult. But I see no reason for treating any one kind of decision— not even the simple kind which the economist has the good fortune to be able to treat as the norm for the kind of behavior he studies— as rational par excellence. Why, I wonder, should the political scientist take it for granted that a conception of rationality which the economist has found especially useful in constructing his theories (though he has sometimes overestimated it) should also be useful to him for a similar purpose? Why should he imagine— as he too often does— that his right to call himself that a decision involving a
299
The
Social Sciences
upon his using it? I do not deny that poHtical behavior probably a good deal more like production for the market or like spending money to maintain a family than it is like wTiting poetry or painting a picture, but I doubt whether it is so much like them that the student of politics has much to gain by speaking of rationality as the economist a scientist depends is
and limited purposes. Man when he acts sometimes rational and sometimes irrational, just as he is when he produces goods for the market or makes purchases, or writes poetry or paints pictures, but in order to act rationally, whatever he does, he need not (and indeed often cannot) make the sort of decisions which for the economist are the mark of the efficient producer. The study of politics is, or could be, just as scientific as the study of production and exchange, but in order to be so, or become so, it need speaks of
politically
it
for his professional
is
not imitate economics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Berelsox, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N. Voting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Dahl, Robert A. A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: Phoenix Books edition, University of Chicago Press, 1963. Dahl, Robert A., and Lindblom, Charles E. Politics, Economics, and Welfare. New York: Harper Torchbook edition, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1963.
Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1957.
Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard R.. and Gaudet, Hazel. The People's Choice. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944. ScHUMPETER, JosEPH A. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper Torchbook edition. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.,
1962.
NOTE TO THE READER older or classical theory of democracy The richly represented in Great Books of is
the Western World. Locke's Essay Concerning Civil Government, Rousseau's Social Contract,
and
The
Federalist of Madison,
Hamilton,
and Mill's Representative Government— nW of which are included in the setare admittedly among the most important contributions to the theory of democracy. Jefferson, De Tocqueville, and Lincoln have also Jay,
300
contributed to the analysis of democracy. Sefrom their writings will be found in Gateway to the Great Books, Vol. 6. Also, the reader should not forget that Chapter 16 of The Syntopicon is entirely devoted to the idea of Democracy. The introduction and the references cited in that chapter provide the reader with the means of making a systematic survey of the discussion of democracy found in Great Books. lections
PART THREE
The Contemporary Status
of a Great Idea
The
Idea of Equality
reader of the Syntopicon note that equality The 102 Great Ideas. This omission may derive will
entirely
of arbitrariness that admittedly
not one of the from the degree
is
involved in constructing such a
is
list.^
But there are also other possible reasons, and they are worth considering for the light they throw upon equality, which in some ways is a strange and difficult idea. "Equality" appears in the Inventory of Terms and there receives a double entry, as follows: Equality (math.): see Quantity lb; Equality and inequality (poL): see
Tyranny 5a/ see also Citizen Love 4a; Revolution 3a
5;
The
fact that the
Same and Other 3d Democracy 4a-4a(2);
2c-3;
Lahor
7c(2);
Justice
Liherty
If;
term receives two entries indicates one of the curi-
ous features about the discussion of equality. There has always been a suspicion,
and
it is
a suspicion that
still exists,
that equality as applied to
human is at best a derivative idea and that its primary place lies mathematical order; and hence, too, that carrying it over into social and political discussion may be to some extent illicit, confusing, and metaphorical in no helpful way. The fact, too, that the Inventory sends the reader to a number of difthings
in the
ferent chapters to find discussions of equality is
may
suggest that equality
a subordinate or subsidiary idea that does service under a larger,
complex, and genuinely "great" idea. intellectual substance
was expended
democracy. another possible reason
One might
infer that
more
most of
its
in its contribution to the idea of
justice or of Still
may be
why
it
failed to
make
the
list
of 102 ideas
what might be called a historically delayed idea; that is, an idea that was late in coming to have an impact on human history and for that reason also late in becoming a subject of major discussion and dispute in our intellectual tradition. This last reason is perhaps the most interesting one. Alexis de Tocque-
1
the fact that
it
is
See the essay on the construction of the Syntopicon, GBVVVV, Vol.
303
3, p.
1223.
The Status ville
of a Great Idea
and political ideal is was "the novel object" that he discovered
strongly maintained that equality as a social
modern
a peculiarly
idea. It
on coming to America in the early days of the republic to study the nature and eflFects of democracy. He asserted that equality was the "prithe fundamental fact from which all others seem to be mary fact observations constantly derived and the central point at which all .
.
.
.
.
.
terminated."^ Since the time of Tocqueville the idea of equality has certainly
come
own. It is a fundamental ideal of democracy and the central moral term in the Socialist tradition, in both its Marxist and non-Marxist into
its
forms.
strongly involved in our gravest international issues: those
It is
from the inequality between the great and the many new small powers; and especially the great and scandalous inequality, as regards the conditions for a decent human life, between the northern and southern hemispheres of our earth. that arise
While Tocqueville emphasized that equality is a peculiarly modern he also pointed out that it has roots deep in the past. He called upon the men of his time to recognize that "the gradual and progressive development of social equality is at once the past and the future of their
idea,
history.
.
.
."^ It is
likewise true of the philosophical controversy about
deep in the past, although only in the have a major place. We will accordingly begin our analysis with a brief review of the past of the controversy. For that purpose we will consider what Great Books of the Western World have to say about equality. From this review we obtain some insight into the major issues and at the same time develop the terminology— the grammar, one might say— needed for analyzing the discussion of equality. We will then turn to review the contemporary literature on the subject. The discussion is complex and often confusing. Space will prevents consideration of all of even the major issues in the discussion. We will focus our attention on two only: the generic notion of equality, and the question of the justification of the principle of equal
equality that
it
too has
modern world has
it
its
come
roots
to
treatment.
EQUALITY Equality,
IN
GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD and political ideal for all men, is admittedly a modern world. In the ancient world inequality was
as a social
feature of our
both the ideal and the fact. Such major opposites as Greek-Barbarian, Spartan-Helot, Roman-non-Roman, freeman-slave, all point to deep and important inequalities. Yet it is also a fact that the ancient Greeks, at a
2 Democracy in America 3 Ibid., p. 7.
(New
York: Albert A. Knopf, 1945), Vol.
304
I,
p. 3.
The Idea
of Equality
and political level, were greatly concerned with equality, shown by the extensive vocabulary of "equality-words" that they developed. The more important ones are the following: certain social as
is
isonomia: equality before the law isothnia: equality of honor isopoliteia: equality of political rights isokratia: equality of political power isopsephia: equality of votes or suffrage isegoria: equality in right to speak isoteleia: equality of tax or tribute isomoiria: equality of shares or partnership isokleria: equality of property isodaimonia: equality of fortune
The English any but the clear
translations of the
Greek are rough and too short
to give
slightest indication of the force of the original. Yet they are
enough
to enable us to
make
several important distinctions about
equality.
We
note in the
first
place that
all
are equalities of traits that
men
pos-
involvement in and with the society of their fellowmen. They are traits that one has as part of one's social environment as distinguished from what is part of one's person. Political power, for examsess in virtue of their
ple,
is
a diflPerent kind of
trait or characteristic
though, as Herodotus reported,
from physical height, even
men sometimes
obtain political power
because of their height.^ Yet with respect to both characteristics, we may compare two men and judge them equal or unequal in political power or in height.
In these two attributions of equality we are dealing with diflPerent ways in which equality may be possessed. The traits or features that we compare in respect of equality or inequality may be inherent in the person, as height is; or they may be a condition that one has as a result of his place in society,
such as political power.
We
phrase "personal equality" for equalities of the
will accordingly use the
first
sort
and "conditional
equality" for those of the second.
Of course, the same distinction holds for inequalities. But it is tedious and unnecessary to repeat "inequality" every time we use "equality." Henceforth, we will assume that the distinctions that we find necessary for the analysis of equality also hold for inequality, unless
we
explicitly
assert the contrary.
All the equalities referred to
conditional equalities. respect.
Each
by the Greek lexicon
set forth
Some, however, are of such a
sort as to
III.
20;
GBWW,
Vol. 6, p. 93c,
305
some
admit of degrees, whereas
others do not. All citizens, for example, are equal as citizens
4 The History
above are
consists in an equality of condition in
and have
The Status
of a Great Idea
equal political rights (isopoliteia). But not
have equal politian ordinary voter is, yet he obviously possesses much greater power. This example reveals still another distinction among equalities. It is the distinction between what we will call a difference of degree and a difference of type. In the one case, men are equal or unequal with respect to a trait, such as political power, that may be possessed in varying degrees. In the other case, there is no question of degree but merely of the presence or absence of a trait, such as citizenship. In making judgments about equality, we may sometimes combine the two kinds into a still more complex judgment. A political officeholder and a citizen who does not hold office are unequal, their inequality being based on a diflFerence of type. The President and a congressman are equal inasmuch as both are officeholders. Yet they are greatly unequal cal
power
(i^okratia).
The President
is
all
citizens
no more a
citizen than
with respect to the political power they possess. Neither is more nor less an officeholder than the other, but one does have much more power. Still another diflFerence among the various conditional equalities lies in the fact that they belong to diflFerent orders of our life in society, to the diflFerent institutions by which we arrange and order our relations with each other. Thus we distinguish between our legal, social, political, and economic interests and institutions. Although no hard and fast line separates one from another, we do distinguish such orders and speak of legal equality, social equality, political equality, and economic equality. Our Greek lexicon of equalities can be arranged accordingly. One equality that we do not find named in the Greek lexicon is equality of
opportunity. This
is
a conditional equality in that opportunity
not part of our person but a condition of our environment. Yet
is
seems does not it
from other conditional equalities, since it any particular institutional recognition of status, as legal equality does, for example. Equality of opportunity is a vaguer notion than the equalities of status. As we shall see, it is also a modern notion, one that the Greeks had no word for because they did not conceive of it
markedly consist
diflFerent
in
as a possibility.
about equality upon which men all along the greatest issue about equality, at least in the ancient world, has been implicit. It appears the moment we ask who is supposed to be equal in honor, political rights So far
we have
yet to
meet an
issue
take diflFerent and opposed positions. Yet
and power, and in the other various conditional equalities. No ancient Greek would ever have thought of demanding them for all men. He would have taken it for granted that such equalities were the prerogative only of freemen and of Greeks. In other words, it was never seriously doubted that inequality should be the rule in relations between Greeks and barbarians, between citizens and noncitizens, and between freemen and slaves. 306
The Idea
of Equality
Inequality and Slavery central issue with The without doubt, the
regard to equality in the ancient world was,
institution of slavery.
As Rousseau remarked,
slavery constitutes "the last degree of inequality."*"'
The ancient
contro-
versy concerned the cause and justification of that great inequality. Al-
though the discussion is neither especially obscure nor difficult, it is complex. At the start, then, it may be helpful to indicate schematically the various positions that were taken. First
is
the position that
some men are
slaves
by
nature.
The theory
behind this position maintains that men are radically unequal in type and that the inferior are meant by nature to be the slaves of others. To treat some men as slaves and others as free is justified on the ground that
some men are
in fact slaves while others are not.
Unequal treatment
is
based on what is claimed to be an inequality in fact. The second position asserts that all men are by nature equal and, hence, denies that there are any men who are by nature slaves. Yet it does not denounce all slavery as unjust and call for its abolition. W^ile asserting the natural equality of men, it still permits radically unequal treatment by accepting conventional or legal slavery. the slaves of others, that condition stitutions
The
and not
the result of
If
some men are
human and
social in-
of nature.
third position,
one that not only
is
and the
last that
need be distinguished here, is the men but, on the basis
asserts the natural equality of all
any form of slavery is intrinsically unjust. and third positions are the clearest and most definite. The second, at least to us now, is logically weaker and harder to justify. Yet, as is so often the case in social and political aflFairs, the logically weaker doctrine long held the dominant position. Whatever the error, or evil, in the practical order of their civilization, it was typical of the Greeks that they clearly recognized and faced the issue in the theoretical order. Aristotle both took a definite position and argued for its rightness; he also discerned the structure of a position opposed to his. He is the prime exponent of our first position, the doctrine of
it,
also argues that
The
first
of natural slavery.
one "who is by nature not his own but who, being a human being, is also a possession. an instrument of action, separable from the possessor."^ Then he asked, "is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom .?" He declared at once: "There such a condition is expedient and right is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and Aristotle defined a slave as
another man's,
.
.
.
.
.
5 6
On
GBWW,
the Origin of Inequality, 2ncl Part; Vol. 9, p. 447c. 1254al4;
Politics,
.
GBWW,
307
Vol. 38, p. 359d.
.
.
The Status
of a Great Idea
For that some should rule and others be ruled
of fact.
necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth,
out for subjection, others for rule."'
The mark
of
it
is
a thing not only
some are marked
lies in
the diflFerence
and freemen. "When then there is such a diflFerence," he wrote, "as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master. For he who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature. Whereas the lower animals cannot even apprehend a principle; they obey their instincts. And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very dif-
between the bodies and
souls of slaves
both with their bodies minister
ferent; for
then," Aristotle concluded, "that
clear,
to the
some men
needs of are
"It is
life."
by nature
free,
and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right." ^ Some men are by nature slaves; therefore, they should be treated as slaves, and to treat them otherwise would be unjust. This conclusion follows only
if
we
assume, with Aristotle, that unequals should be treated
unequally. Although
it
is
not stated in so
many words in when he
quoted, he did assert this principle explicitly,
the text just
"For
wrote:
equals the honourable and the just consist in sharing alike, as
is
just
and equal. But that the unequal should be given to equals, and the unlike to those who are like, is contrary to nature, and nothing which is contrary to nature
is
good."^
Aristotle also reported the position that
doctrine of natural slavery. "Others
master over slaves
and freeman
is
is
aflfirm,"
most strongly opposed to his he wrote, "that the rule of a
contrary to nature, and that the distinction between
by law
and not by nature; and being an would appear to entail the abolition of slavery, since, presumably, what is unjust should not be allowed to continue. This conclusion, however, was seldom, if ever, drawn in antiquity. The more common position was the one taken by both the Stoics and the Christians, which asserts the natural equality of men without condemning legal, or conventional, slavery as slave
exists
interference with nature
is
only,
therefore unjust."^" This last clause
unjust.
common Stoic doctrine when he wrote, in The Laws, no one thing so like or so equal to another as in e\'ery into man. And if the corruption of customs, and the variation
Cicero voiced the that "there
stance
7 8 9 10
man
Ibid.,
is
is
1254al8;
p. 447cl.
448b-c. 1325b7; p. 529c. Cf. 1280al0; p. 477c. 1253b20; p. 447a.
Ibid., 12541)16; p. Ibid.,
Ibid.,
308
The Idea
of Equality
minds and turn them aside from the course of nature, no one would more nearly resemble himself than all men would resemble all men. Therefore, whatever definition we give of man will be applicable to the whole human race. And this is a good argument that there is no dissimilarity of kind among men; because if this were the case, one definition could not include all men."^^ The position of the early Christians was expressed by Jesus, when He said all men are brothers under one heavenly Father, and by St. Paul, when he declared: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ of opinions, did not induce an imbecility of
esus.
^-
No one
could ask for stronger and more forthright expressions of the
unity and equality of mankind. Yet neither Cicero nor
St. Paul argued from this that there should be no slavery because it is contrary to nature and unjust. Aristotle had argued from the fact of inequality to the justice of unequal treatment. But they did not argue from the fact of equality to the need for equal treatment. They accepted slavery without question. Of course, it was not for them natural but a convention made by men and sanctioned by law. It could not be justified, as Aristotle claimed, by an appeal to nature but would have to be justified, as any other convention or law, by appeal to its need and utility for the social good. Presumably they held, because of their view of the technical and economic impossibilities, that the slavery of some was the price that had to be
paid for civilization. In a statement surprising for
its
moment seemed to see a way could accomplish its own work," he
for a
anticipation of the future, Aristotle
out of slavery. "If every instrument wrote, "obeying or anticipating the
will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus,
manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves ."^^ In this forecast of our automated technological society, Aristotle saw the conditions under which slavery would become unnecessary. Yet in the next sentence he withdrew from even ...
if,
in like
the lyre without a
remote possibility by noting that a slave is needed not only for producing useful goods, but also for service in the household, where there is no question of production. For Aristotle, as for almost everyone else during the next two thousand years, a civilized life without slavery was this
practically inconceivable.
Many centuries had to pass before it became easy to deny that slavery has any basis whatsoever; in other words that, all men being equal, none
De legibus I. 10, 28. 12 Matthew, 23:8-9; Galatians, 3:28. Cf. I Corinthians, 12:13; Colossians, 3:11, Vol. 9, p. 447b-c. 13 Politics, 1253b34; 11
GBWW,
309
The Status
of a Great Idea
should be treated as slaves. Rousseau gave strong expression to this position, some twenty-two centuries after Aristotle. He charged Aristotle, in effect, with mistaking the results of treatment for those of nature.
saw
Aristotle
that slaves differed
from freemen
in bodily structure
and
behavior and concluded that nature was the cause. Rousseau accused him of failing to appreciate "how far even the natural inequalities of
mankind
and influence" which he supposed.
are from having that reality
According
to Rousseau's statement: "It
is
in fact easy to see that
many
which distinguish men are merely the effect of habit and the different methods of life men adopt in society." In effect, he turned Aristotle's argument completely around: if a slave has the body of a slave and behaves as a slave, it is because he has been treated as of the differences
a slave.
^'^
From
this brief
review of the arguments about slavery
we can
obtain
more distinctions bearing on equality. The first is the distinction between specific and nonspecific equality. Not even Aristotle denied that slaves are men; in fact, the difficulty with his doctrine of natural slavery is that he wanted to maintain that slaves are men and yet could justly several
though they were not men but merely living tools. For him, are not, as men, equal in worth, whereas for the Stoics and Chris-
be treated all
men
as
tians they are.
Different views about the origin or basis distinction that also applies to equality.
they are
traits
we
Some
slavery yield another
of
traits
we have
are natural;
are born with, whether innate or congenital. Other
upon us, during the course of our developcan accordingly speak of natural or acquired equalities or inequalities, meaning thereby that the trait with respect to which men are judged to be equal or unequal is either natural or acquired. The looks, abilities, and behavior of a slave are natural inferiorities according to Aristotle, whereas according to Rousseau they are acquired as a result traits are
acquired, or imposed
ment.
We
of the
way he
is
treated.
The argument over slavery also reveals the need for between descriptive and prescriptive statements involving
distinguishing equality.
The
descriptive statement, like Aristotle's assertion about natural slaves, aims to describe a factual condition.
the freeman in abiHty
equality in height.
is
The
The
inequality
held to be as
much
between the slave and
a matter of fact as their in-
prescriptive statement
makes
a practical
demand
and asserts a moral or social claim for a certain kind of regard or action, as in the statement that A and B should be given equal shares. Aristotle, as we have seen, makes a descriptive statement the basis or warrant for the prescriptive
demand: Some men
are
by nature
slaxes and, therefore,
they should be treated as slaves.
14
On
the Origin of Inequality, 1st Part;
GBWW, 310
Vol. 38, p. 347a-d.
The Idea
of Equality
Political Uses of Equality
Somost.
the idea of inequality, not equality, that has been upper-
far, it is
We
turn
now
to consider the development of the idea of That development is most readily seen from the political uses to which equality comes to be put. It functions as a basic premise in the arguments for the political development that runs from constitutionalism through democracy to socialism.
equality.
The as
assertions of the natural equality of
first
we have
and
St.
seen, without
any
Paul asserted equality, without using
and
men
as
political implications at it
to
men were made, all.
Both Cicero
argue for the abolition
advance the cause of democracy. Yet when equality did become important in political discussion— and that seems to occur first, in any systematic way, with the social contract theorists—it did so at a fundamental and early place in the arguments. Although Hobbes and Locke reached opposed conclusions regarding the right political regime— and that by itself is of great interest in the development of the idea of equality— it must first be noted that they both agreed in making assertions about equality early and in controlling premof slavery
certainly not to
ises in their political philosophies.
Both writers asserted the natural equality of all men by proposing what men would be like in a "state of nature" without subjection to any kind of political rule or government. According to Hobbes, "Nature hath made men so equal in the facilities of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly
the hypothesis of
stronger in
body
or of quicker
mind than
when
another, yet
all is
reck-
oned together, the diflFerence between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, And as to the the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, faculties of the mind, ... I find yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength. For prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themFrom this equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in selves unto. .
.
.
.
.
.
the attaining of our ends."^**
For Locke, the state of nature is "a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one
amongst another, without subordination or
subjection."^*' This equality
GBWW,
Vol. 23, p. 84c-cl. 15 Leviathan, chap, xiii; Vol. 35, p. 16 Treatise of Civil Government XL ii. 4;
GBWW,
311
24cl.
The Status
of a Great Idea
man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man." Such equality, he held, is not inconsistent with many inequalities: "Age or virtue may is
"that equal right that every
give
men
a just precedency. Excellency of parts and merit
others above the
common
level. Birth
may
subject some,
and
may
place
alliance or
pay an observance to those to whom Nature, gratimay have made it due."^^ Thus both Hobbes and Locke would have subscribed, although in different ways, to the proposition that all men are equal by nature. They made very diflFerent political uses of it, however. For Hobbes, this equality of nature amounts to an equality of weakness which makes necessary an absolute government; whereas, for Locke, it is an equality in freedom which leads to a limited or constitutional government. In Locke's own thinking equality could hardly be said to be democratic. Legal and political equality should be enjoyed only by the few who are privileged to be citizens; they are not rights of all. Yet just as equality could be used to argue for constitutionalism, so too it could be called upon to advance the cause of democracy. Because men are equally free and able to govern themselves, government must be responsible as well as limited: responsible and accountable, so that the governed may make eflFective judgments about the way they are governed; and limited, lest government infringe upon and deny the fundamental freedom of man. The Declaration of Independence reveals the democratic use of equality, provided its words are read as a pledge to the future. First, in declarbenefits others, to
tude, or other respects,
ing that all
"all
men
men. Second,
that all rights,"
men
are created equal," it
it
asserted the natural equality of
called for a basic equality of treatment in asserting
"endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable among which are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." are
In practice, however, the recognition of equal rights
fell far
short of
Nothing shows this more strikingly— more scandalously, we would now say— than the clause in the Constitution specifying the basis for political representation: it "shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons." ^^ Here, in words for anyone to read, it was claimed that some men do not count, politically, as men at all, while others amount to only three-fifths of a man. Kant, also, vigorously asserted the specific equality of all men but then set a limit to the extent to which it should find expression in political equality. "There is," he wrote, ". an innate equality belonging to every universality.
.
.
17 Ibid., II. vi. 54; p. 36c. 18 Comtitution of the United States, Art.
I,
312
Sect. 2;
GBWW,
Vol. 43, p. lib.
The Idea
man which It is,
be independent of being bound by which he may also reciprocally bind
consists in his right to
others to anything
them.
of Equality
more than
that to
consequently, the inborn quality of every
man
in virtue of
which he ought to be his own master by n'g/if."^'' Being one's own master would seem to call for political equality, or the right to have, at least, some say about how one is governed. Kant recognized such a right— "civil equality," he called it— and, although he allowed it much scope, he finally qualified it by calling for a limitation on suffrage. He drew a distinction between ''active and passive citizenship" according as one is or is not economically independent. As examples of the economically dependent, he cited "the apprentice of a merchant or tradesman, a servant who is not in the employ of the state, a minor {naturaJiter vel civiliter), all women, and, generally, every one who is compelled to maintain himself not according to his own industry, but ." Such persons, being dependent on the as it is arranged by others will of others, are unequal to them, hence "not equally qualified to exer." cise the right of suffrage under the constitution, and to be full citizens For this reason, Kant wanted to deny them the vote, although he added the proviso that the laws must make it "possible for them to raise themselves from this passive condition in the state to the condition of active citizenship." 20 He apparently conceived the condition as not a permanent one for all who are in it. .
.
.
The Kantian position reflects vividly had in the past as well as its
equality
the adventures that the idea of future developments. In
dependency a
the condition of economic
zenship, he transposed, as
it
.
making
disqualification for active
citi-
were, the structure of a natural slavery
doctrine into the conventional and conditional order. But in implying that such a condition
is
not necessarily a permanent one, he raised the
critical
question regarding the alterability or inalterabilty of that condi-
tion of
economic dependency.
In Great Books of the Western World concern for the full import of specific equality first finds expression in the work of John Stuart Mill. He expressly identified equality with "the principle of democracy," and in
name
demanded equal
all. "There ought to be he wrote. "There is not equal suffrage where every single individual does not count for as much as any other single individual in the community."-^ And where there is not equal suffrage there is injustice: "it is a personal injustice to withhold
the
of justice
no pariahs
in a full-grown
and
suffrage for
civilised nation,"
from any one, unless for the prevention of greater evils, the ordinary privilege of having his voice reckoned in the disposal of affairs in which 19
The Science
of Right, Intro.;
GBWW,
20 Ibid., 2nd Part, 46; p. 437a-c. 21 Representative Government, chap, p. 307d.
viii;
Vol. 42, p. 401c.
GBWW,
313
Vol. 43, p. 382b;
and chap,
vii;
The he has the same interest
Status of a Great Idea as other people."-^'
Hence
Mill opposed any
"limitation of the suflFrage, involving the compulsory exclusion of any
portion of the citizens from a voice in the representation."
The basic reason underlying this demand for political equality would seem to rest, for Mill, on the equal right of all to happiness and its means —political status being understood as one of the means. In Utilitarianism,
he maintained that "one person's happiness, supposed equal in degree (with the proper allowance made for kind), is [to be] counted for exactly as much as another's." Consequently, everyone has an equal claim to happiness:
"everybody
to
count for one, nobody for more than one."
This equal claim to happiness "involves an equal claim to
all
the
means
from which Mill then concluded that "all persons are deemed to have a right to equality of treatment, except when some recognised social expediency requires the reverse. And hence all social inequalities, which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have ."-^ been tolerated; Mill put certain limitations on universal suflFrage, but he maintained that these "do not conflict with this principle." One is literacy, including a command of arithmetic, but such "elementary acquirements" must be within the reach of everyone: "universal teaching must precede universal enfranchisement." Some echo of Kant's position appears in his demand that "the receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise. He who cannot by his labour suflBce for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of of happiness,"
.
.
others." ^^ Mill also
recommended another
inequality in suflFrage.
On
the
ground that "the judgment of the higher moral or intellectual being is worth more than that of the inferior," he argued that it has "a claim to superior weight." He accordingly proposed that the vote of the more highly educated should be given greater weight than others.-"' The persistence, even in Mill, of economic dependency as a basis for unequal juridical and political treatment makes it clear— at least in retrospect—why the next stage in the development concerned the alterability of conditions that allowed any man to be in a crippling dependency upon another man. Mill's exclusion of those on relief shows clearly why Socialist writers were led to criticize and condemn "bourgeois equality" and to call for much more far-reaching equalities. In his book AntiDiihring, Engels claimed that there
is
a "proletarian
demand
for equal-
22 Ibid., chap, viii; pp. 382b, 381b. 23 Utilitarianism, chap, v; GBWW, Vol. 43, p. 475l:^c. 24 Representative Government, chap, viii; GBWW, Vol. 43, pp. 382c-d, 383d. 25 Ibid., p. 384c-cl.
314
The Idea
of Equality
which builds upon the "bourgeois demand," but goes far beyond it: "Equahty must not be merely apparent, must not apply merely to the sphere of the state, but must also be real, must be extended to the social and economic sphere." Such has been the constant demand of all the various Socialist parties. Engels went on to a characteristic Communist ity,"
position
when he then
declared that "the real content of the proletarian
demand
for equality
the
mand
for equality
is
demand
for the abolition of classes.
which goes beyond
Any
of necessity, passes
that,
deinto
absurdity."-^
Beneath the ideological
talk
about "bourgeois" and "proletarian" de-
mands is the just observation that equality in law and in fact can be far removed from one another. Anatole France, and later R. H. Tawney, stressed the irony of legal equality by itself. The poor as well as the rich are equally entitled to dine at the Ritz or to sleep under the bridge; but
only the rich can
afiFord
the one and only the poor are ever compelled
Legal equality— the right to sue for justice— is merely formal, nominal only, if one does not also possess the means and powers to exercise that right. The possession of one right, say legal equality, may presuppose a prior equality of another kind, in this 'case the minimal economic equality of those able to afford the cost of going to court. In concluding this survey of what the Great Book authors have had to say about equality, it is worth considering Mill's expression of wonder that inequalities should have been tolerated for so long. The pattern of all the arguments for equality of treatment that we have considered so far has been the same: it consists in an assertion of fundamental equality to the latter.
among men
that
is
then
made
the basis of the
we have
demand
for equality of
fundamental specific equality of men was asserted long before it was followed up with the demand for even the abolition of slavery, let alone for such political equalities as were proposed in constitutionalism, democracy, and treatment in some respect. Yet, as
seen, the
socialism. It
was easy
time to
for Rousseau, Mill, Engels,
make such demands;
the twentieth century. But
it
is
easier
why was
it
and
still
so
for
many more
for us to
difficult, if
in their
advance them
in
not impossible, for
Paul? Perhaps John Plamenatz provides an answer when he writes: "The ardor for equality of rights which led to revolution in France and to reform in England was not born of men's at last discoverCicero and
St.
ing that they were by nature less unequal than they had hitherto supposed, or that social distinctions bore too
we have
little
relation to differences of
Hobbes, and Locke held this much. "It came, above all, from the belief that men could by their own efforts change and improve their political and social envicharacter and talent." As
seen, Cicero, St. Paul,
26 Anti-Duhring (New York: International Publishers, 1939), pp. 117-118.
315
The Status
of a Great Idea
which
Uke the Encyclopaedists in France and the Philosophical Radicals in England apart from the great majority of political and social theorists before them. They were egalitarians because they were optimists. But their optimism did not consist in their asserting human equality in a sense denied before them; in their saying that all men have certain inalienable rights, or that one man's happiness must count for as much as another's, or that every man is apt to be a better judge than other people of his own interest. All this had been said long before they said it. Their optimism consisted in their belief that a great deal could be done, here and now, to improve the lot ronment.
It is this belief, this faith,
sets thinkers
of all classes in society."-'
In other words,
what
is
new and
for the discussion of equality
is
provides an entirely
the opening
up
difiPerent stage
of possibilities never be-
Extreme inequalities in all orders were accepted and were thought to be unalterable conditions of civilized life. Even if in theory they were alterable— witness the pictures of a golden age of equality in the past— it was thought that they were not alter-
fore envisioned.
tolerated because they
able in practice. If not slavery, then at least gross inequality in status
and education and labor was taken
to
be the price of
civilization.
By
the
nineteenth century, however, at least in the Western world, opportuni-
were discovered that had never been dreamed of before. The unalwere found to be alterable. Equalities of all kinds and in all orders came to be demanded for all men, not just for the privileged few. Equality became a controlling political and social ideal. ties
terable conditions accepted for centuries
GENERIC EQUALITY
From
this
World,
survey of the discussion in Great Books of the Western seen how human equality came to be a major politi-
we have
cal and social ideal. We have yet to consider, however, the question we encountered at the very start about the meaning of equality as it appears in such diverse orders as the political and the mathematical.
We have already seen that "equality" has a wide range of uses. We have made many distinctions. Yet our view has remained a very restricted one, since we have confined our attention to the way equality appears in discussion about relations between men. Even in this area we have by no means exhausted the various ways that the term is used. Yet one of the main uses of "equality" occurs in mathematics. Here too there are many different uses, as is evident from the many different types of expressions in which the symbol for equality (=) appears. Taking only the most common, we meet such expressions as the following: 27
Man and
Society (London: Longmans, 1963), Vol.
316
II,
pp. 24-25,
The Idea 7
+
5
=
12;
+ hY =
(a
fl-
+
lab
+
of Equality
Z?-;
y
=
j{x)-
^^ =
We
2.r.
find
it
said
AB = 2AC or that one triangle is equal to one is said to equal the other if all the elements of one map one-to-one onto the elements of the other. So also, two classes or relations are equal if they have the same number of members: of the sides of a triangle that
Of two
another.
thus American
armed
collections,
and commanders-in-chief
presidents
forces are
two
diflFerent concepts, or classes,
the
of
American
but they are equal
because they include the same number of men; in fact, the same men. Our interest, however, lies not so much with the various uses of "equality" in mathematics as with the relation bets\^een those uses and the way the
word
is
applied to
men and
their concerns. It often seems to be taken fundamental meaning of equality lies in the
for granted that the root or
mathematical order and that its use in human afiFairs is somehow derivative and an extension or adaptation of that use. On this question, the contemporary literature reveals a sharp diversity of opinion. R. H. Tawney, an ardent socialist and author of an influen-
book on human
acknowledges that equality "possesses a "it is an arithmetical metaphor for a relation between human beings." ^'^ From this it sounds as if he contial
equality,
variety of divergent meanings," yet asserts
siders that the
first
home
of the idea lies in the field of mathematics.
Jacques Maritain, on the other hand, declares that
"when applied
to
man,
this idea, from the very outset, puts the philosopher to the test, for it is surrounded by geometrical imagery" which he must oppose and "work
constantly against the grain of."-^ expressions denoting
If
human
from mathematics, we ought
equality derive, at least historically,
pay some attention to this source of the idea. On the other hand, there would be no such need if human equality could stand on its own, as it were, without any reference to mathematics. The latter possibility, of course, would greatly simplify our inquiry, and
we is
turn
now
to
to consider the evidence
we
possess for believing that
it
of this issue about the range of the term
is
the case.
Contemporary recognition explicit in the writing of
H. A. Bedau,
who
asserts that
derstand "the conceptual network of equality, that tions
among such all
to un-
the logical rela-
expressions as 'equal,' 'identical,' 'same,' 'similar.'
All are closely related, yet
from
is,
we need
the others and has
Bedau wants its
own
to
show
that "equality"
"•'^"
difi^ers
especial contribution to make.
Equality has something to do with sameness yet
diflFers
from
it.
Equal
28 Equality (rev. ed.; New York: Capricorn Books, 1961), p. 92. 29 "Human Equality," in Ransoming the Time (New York: Scribner's, 1941), p. 1. 30 "Egalitarianism and the Idea of Equality," in Nomos IX: Eqttalitij [A7X], ed. York: Atherton Press, 1967), p. 4. J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (New
317
The amounts of sugar and
Status of a Great Idea
flour are the
same amounts; equally expensive
suits
are suits that cost the same; to equalize the tension on a set of springs
is
put each spring under the same tension.*^^ In other words, equality supposes some element of sameness. There must be some basis of comto
parability. (Note, etymologically, that "comparability"
amounts
to "capa-
being equal with.") Things that are absolutely or utterly diverse are incomparable.
bility of
Between things such as Aristotle, a hard surface, a loud noise, a red there is mere diversity; hence no question of equality or inequality. There are many respects in which Aristotle may be said to be equal or unequal to Plato, but none whatsoever in which he could be said to be equal or unequal to a hard surface, and the same holds true for any other pair that can be made from these four items. We do speak of a color flag,
being loud, but no one, except in the realm of poetry with its freedom for metaphor, would think of asking whether the loudness of an explosion
was equal
to the brightness of a color.
Yet
we can compare two
colored objects with respect to brightness or two sounds with respect
them equal or unequal. In these cases there is not mere otherness; there is some respect in which they are the same and with reference to which they can be compared. Yet in order for two things to be equal, they cannot be the same in all and
to loudness
find
respects, or identical. In other words,
complete identity eliminates any
question of equality. There would not even be two things, since to be
two implies some respect
in
which they are distinguishable from each
other. "^-
Things that are equal or unequal must, then, be both same and different. The respect in which they are the same, so as to be comparable, is itself capable of further analysis. Suppose we were comparing two collections. There are many different ways of comparing them— many dif-
which they can be judged. One of these respects is number: how many items or individuals are there in each collection? Once we have settled on this aspect for comparison, we have selected one definite aspect from the many possible points of comparison. Yet it should be noted that number by itself merely as a basis for comparison is still indeterminate and does not become determinate until we have discovered how many items there are. Until we have actually counted them, or at least matched each item in one collection with one and only one in
ferent respects in
31 Ihid., p. 5. 32 As Bedaii writes, "our ordinary concept of equality does not admit of our sayinp that Tully is equal to Cicero, or that water is equal to ILO, or that any two things are ecjual to each other unless we are ready to deny the possibilitv' of their identity. K(iuality thus not only does not imply identity, it implies nonidentity." Equality, in other words, is a relation amon^ at least two things. .
.
.
Ibid., p. 8.
318
The Idea the other,
we
of Equality
cannot say whether the two collections are equal or
not.**'*
The Metaphysical Issue far we have found that the meaning of equality involves the basic Sonotions of one and many and of same and thus appears diflFerent. It
that the issue concerning generic equality— that
is,
any root meaning run-
ning through the use of "equality" in different orders— must seek its resolution in metaphysics. Two collections are equinumerous when they have
same number of items; two lines are equal when they have the same two triangles are equal when they have the same area. The question, then, is whether equality is anything more than sameness in a certain determinate respect. Is the meaning of equality exhausted by the note of sameness, and the meaning of inequality by the note of difference? If not, what additional note is involved? It would be strange if there were no additional note. For then the idea of equality and inequality would have no conceptual content whatsoever apart from sameness and difference. The words "equality" and "inequality" would be merely verbal synonyms for "same" and "different." It would then be possible to do without the words "equal" and "unequal" altogether. However, if the two pairs of words are not interchangeable, so that we cannot use "same" to replace "equal," this fact would indicate that the two are not identical in content and that "equality" must involve some additional note over and above that of sameness. As Bedau observes, "the requisite condition of substitutivity for synonym-pairs fails for this pair. If I gave Mark and Paul equal servings, I did not give them the same serving; what I did was to serve them the same amount, servings of the same size. If I gave you the same answer I gave him, I didn't give you an answer equal to the one I gave him: I gave you the very answer I gave him. To say a man is equal to the task is not to say the man is the same as the task, but that he is up to perthe
length;
forming the task."-^^ "Equal," then, is not the equivalent of "same." Ordinary usage thus indicates that "equality" signifies something addition to mere sameness. What, then,
33
is
in
the additional note? Aristotle
make the distinction between these two different bases between what W. E. Johnson calls the determinable and the determinate. Thus 126 is a determinate of the determinabk^ number, and so, too, long or short is a determinate of the determinable length, and white or black of color, and round or square of shape. Logic, Vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1964), p. 176. To begin to spell out what is involved in saying that two things are equal, or that a znh, we must be able to specify the determinable respect, say F, present in both a and in h, which is determinate ;/ in a and p" in h; that is, if p' differs from p", then we know that the two things are unequal, or It is
useful to be able to
for comparison, or
that
34 Op.
ay^h. cit.,
p. 7.
319
The Status
of a Great Idea
was the first to undertake a systematic study of the term "equality," and his analysis still provides a good beginning. His main consideration of equality comes in the analysis of unity in Book Ten of the Metaphysics, where he also comments at length upon the various meanings of "one," "same," "like." We need not go into as much detail as he does. We have already covered some of the ground, and our only purpose now is to obtain the terminology we need to note clearly the additional meaning that "equality" has over and above that of sameness. Aristotle put his finger on the new note by asking what is the opposite of equal. His discussion is difficult and crabbed, since he is struggling to
develop a theory of opposition. Yet
idea of equality. these site,
is
He
"unequal," which
since
by
does result in illuminating the
it
notes that "equal" has diflFerent opposites. is,
One
of
according to his theory, the contrary oppo-
contraries he understands terms
between which there
is
no
intermediary; things capable of being equal or unequal are either one
and not something in between. However, Aristotle notes, "equal" is also opposed to "greater" and "less," as is shown by our asking whether one thing is greater or less than another or equal to it.^^ Both terms are opposed to "equal," while the equal itself seems to be intermediary between what is greater and what is less. The opposition, then, according to his theory, cannot be one of contrariety. What kind is it, then? He considers two other possibilities: the opposition is one of contradiction or of privation. He holds that it cannot be the first, since in his view contradiction involves absolute negation, and contradictory opposites between them exhaust the universe. But, as we have seen, there are many things that are not comparable with respect to being equal or or the other,
to
word "Aristotle" is greater in length than the word makes no sense to ask whether Aristotle is equal or unequal hard. Not everything, then, is equal or unequal, but only that which
is
susceptive of equality."^^ So too, not everything that
greater or less: the "hard," but
it
less is equal,
is
not greater or
"but only the things which are of such a nature as to have
these attributes."'^" There
must be some
characteristic that
is
the
same
being compared, namely that they are the kind of things that can be greater or less, or neither greater nor less but equal. Hence, Aristotle concludes that the opposition of the equal to the greater or less is that of privative negation, and the equal is "that which is neither greater nor less but is naturally fitted to be either." Another translation
in the things
of this last clause
would be
"that
which
the less."^^
35 Metaphysics, 1056a5; GBWW, Vol. 36 Ibid., 1055bl0; p. 582c. 37 Ibid., 1056a21; p. 583b-c. 38 Ibid., 1056a23; p. 583c.
8, p.
320
583a.
is
susceptive of the
more
or
The Idea
of Equality
In the context of this section of his Metaphysics, Aristotle
is
primarily
concerned to develop and test his own theory of the diflFerent kinds of opposites. Leaving that aside, it is pertinent to our concern here that he is trying to draw the line between the same and the equal by claiming that the terms "same" and "other" have a very wide range of applicability, but the terms "equal" and "unequal" are confined in their reference to something, whatever it may be, that is "susceptive of the more or the less." Aristotle's analysis of
equality and inequality, in the context of a
concern about the kinds of opposition, has the interesting consequence
makes a negative point, namely that what more nor less, whereas the assertion of "inequality" point, namely that what is unequal is either more
that the assertion of "equality" is
equal
makes or
neither
is
a positive
less.
from three contemporary writers, one of whom is writing about human equality whereas the other two are concerned with mathematical equality. All three, however, agree that what is fundamental to the idea of equality is "suscepAristotle's analysis of equality receives confirmation
more or the less." Bedau makes the point by way
tivity to the
He
of examples.
writes, "If
you and
I
have an equal right to vote, then neither of us has more or less right to vote than the other, because we have the same right. ... If you and I have the right to an equal vote, then our votes must be counted at the same rate or value, because my vote is worth no more and no less than yours." •^*
Confirmation from Bertrand Russell and from the Cambridge logician
W.
E. Johnson
social
and
is
more
interesting since they are considering, not the
political uses of equality as
Bedau
is,
but primarily
its
mathe-
matical uses. Russell, after considering the "main views of quantitative equality," claims that equality consists in "sameness of magnitude," but
by the
term he understands that which
latter
greater or less than another.
He
direct relation, like greater or less,
same number
of parts,
and
and
also that
affirms, instead, that
it is
ness of relation with respect to magnitude; that
is
capable of being
is
denies that equality it
is
an unanalyzable
means having the
analyzable into same-
to say, with respect to
less.^" Johnson takes the same position when he determ magnitude as is suggested by its etymology, denotes anything of which the relations greaier or less can be predicted: and it can be is only if and N (say) are magnitudes of the same kind that
the
more and the
clares that "the
M
M
said to be greater or less than N."^^
There seems
to
emerge, then, some agreement about
how
equality dif-
39 Op. cit., p. 6. 40 Principles of Mathematics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1951), pp. 159-60, 167-68. 41 Op. cit., p. 153.
321
The Status
of a Great Idea
fers from sameness. For two things to be equal, they must be the same, but with the kind of sameness that involves the negation of the more and the less. Two individuals, A and B, are equally strong swimmers, for example, only if both A and B possess the ability, that is, both can swim, and A has neither more nor less than B, which is to say that in all the ways that swimming ability can be manifested or tested, in speed, endurance, etc., A does every bit as well as B, but no better. Inequality is, accordingly, the kind of difiFerence that involves the affir-
mation of the more and the less. A and B are unequal as swimmers if both possess the ability but A has more, or less, speed, endurance, etc., than B. the
If susceptivity to
more and the
bility of the idea of equality,
it is
less is the
condition for the applica-
evident that the idea
not limited or
is
peculiar to the kind of objects that mathematics studies. There are
human
many
where there is nothing unexceptionable about making judgments regarding the more and the less. Our intellectual habits and acquirements have scope with respect to the range of objects they include, and they dijBFer in degree of cognitive grasp of difiFerent objects within that range; we can compare individuals with regard to their ability and accomplishments in mathematics, Greek, English, etc. The same holds true for habits of will, skill, and character: a woman may be the equal of a man in physical courage and an even greater figure-skater. Our appetites and emotions have intensity. So, too, do colors. Sounds have duration, pitch, timbre. Fields and parks have areas. Hoses and areas of
life
yard goods come in lengths. In all these respects— indeed, in many more— we commonly make judgments of equality and inequality. We do the same, of course, with regard to numbers, lines, triangles, functions,
and the other objects
dent that the idea of equality
is
of mathematics. Yet
somehow more
it
is
than to the others. The analysis of equality or inequality easier
and clearer
in
to the simplifying
mathematics, but that
is
owing mainly,
procedures of the science.
far
from
evi-
appropriate to one order
Its objects
is
if
admittedly not entirely,
are such as to
no need to specify the respect in which lines or numerical results are to be judged equal or unequal, since lines are only lengths and numbers are, as it were, pure multitudes. But to make clear how one pipe is equal to another we must
yield perfectly exact measurements. There
is
specify the respect: length, diameter, weight, durability, etc. In addition, there is the difficulty of accomplishing the physical comparison or measurement. In nonmathematical orders, we may have to be content, for many reasons, with imprecise measurements. But the fact that imprecision is forced upon us by no means entails that such objects fall within the province of the idea of equality only by sufiFerance from
mathematics. ceptive of the
Any
object that
more and the
is
intrinsically measurable,
less, falls
322
that
is,
sus-
within the range of judgments in-
The Idea
of Equality
volving equality, and the lack of precision that
measurement
is
achievable in physical
no criterion of whether "equality"
is
is
being used in a
derivative or metaphorical sense.
In the literature
rare indeed to find any discussion of the generic
it is
On
notion of equality.
the one hand, there are discussions of equality in
On
the other hand,
there are discussions of social and political equality, or
what we have
logic
been
and
work on the foundations
in
calling
should be
so,
human and
equality.
also
why
We
there
of mathematics.
can
is
now
better appreciate
nothing surprising
in
it.
why
It is
this
not be-
cause the two sets of uses are so diverse as to be completely equivocal. In fact, in the
notion of susceptivity to the more and the
some character there
is
that
is
the same,
common ground
a
we have found
less in
respect of
reason for claiming that
underlying both. Yet, given the fact that
this
kind of susceptivity can be found in both orders and belongs no more to
one than to the other, one would not expect to find discussion of it in one order contributing any great or special illumination to understanding of it in the other. However, we have yet to see how the "more and the less" come to be specified so as to yield the notion of human equality.
Human Equality
Men
diflFer in
innumerable ways that involve the more and less and, Some of these, as Plamenatz points
hence, equality and inequality.
out, are of "the kind that
names, although
we do
we sometimes
attend to and call by these
not feel strongly about them"; then there are
others that are "the kind that excite us."^^ It that
make
equality a fighting issue. Since
the subject of our inquiry,
we need
to
it
is
the latter kind, of course,
is
this
kind that constitutes
know what makes an
"exciting"
equality or inequality.
The sort,
equalities
named
and examination
Greek lexicon above are obviously of this them should reveal their exciting quality. But
in our
of
it is simpler to consider a simple contemporary college now calls for the ability to pass and score Admission to example. well on a battery of tests, among the most important of which are the College Board Examinations. These examinations are designed to test scholastic aptitude and achievement and to provide some indication of the ability of a student to do college work. Many colleges use the examinations as an admission test by accepting, for example, only those students who reach a certain score or better on the two aptitude tests. Other factors are also taken into account. But for the purposes here the scores alone provide all that is needed to show how judgments of inequality
for our purposes here
become important. 42 "Diversity of Rights and Kinds of Equality," NIX,
323
p. 82.
The Status
of a Great Idea
Imagine two young people, John and Jane, both finishing high school and wishing to enter the same college. They have taken their College Boards, and John has obtained a combined aptitude score of 1300 while Jane
who
is
black has 1250; both, in other words, achieved high scores
and should be promising students. These scores indicate a measurable diflFerence between the two. John scored more points, Jane less; hence, the two are unequal with respect to these test scores. This inequality is measured mathematically, but it is more than a mathematical or quantitative inequality. Scoring more points on the College Boards is significantly different from, say, weighing more. Both are differences and inequalities of degree. But the greater is also better in the case of the greater test score, since it is better— worth more— for gaining admission to college. Inequality in weight between two people is normally no advantage or disadvantage for college entrance; although, of course, at great extremes, weight might keep one from passing a physical examination.
We
have here,
it
should be noted, two different inequalities. Both
in-
equality in weight and inequality in test scores are inequalties of degree. They describe qualities or traits in which John differs from Jane by hav-
ing more of the quality or evaluative.
With respect
But the inequality in the tests, and presumably
trait.
to
to the aptitudes they claim to measure, the greater
According to the scale by which the
more worth, has greater
of
test results are
test scores
is
also
also with respect is
also the better.
graded, the higher
value. In other words, as
is
measured by the
John is better than Jane in scholastic aptitude. Suppose now the college accepts John for admission and refuses Jane. We then have another difference, another inequality, between the two. Jane is not the equal of John in gaining admission to college. Note that this judgment involves more than just noting a difference between the two, since it also involves value: college admission is a good that Jane desires; hence, in addition to the difference, there is also an inequality— a ranking of what is more and less in value. This inequality is not at all a matter of degree. It is a question of all or none, without any intermediary between the two: one is either admitted or not admitted. W^e have, in other words, an inequality in type as distinguished from an inequalitij test,
of degree.
Such an inequality
we
is
are not yet at the
of the sort Plamenatz speaks of as "exciting." Yet
end
of
it.
Suppose we now ask why John was ad-
mitted and Jane refused. Suppose, too, the deciding factor in the minds of the admissions board was, in fact, her lower score. The inequality now
no longer just evaluative. It has become prescriptive in that it has provided a rule of procedure for the admissions board: cases of doubt or choice should be decided in favor of the student having the higher aptiis
tude score. Of course,
this rule of the
324
higher score
is
not the only crite-
The Idea
of Equalittj
Jane knows that other factors are taken into account by an admismight well feel that she has a right to complain. She had scored high and shown that she was well qualified for college. Yet her application was turned down. Why? Was it because of
rion.
sions board. In her situation she
her sex, or her color? She might be tempted to think so and protest that she had been discriminated against and treated unequally and unfairly.
These
concerns with equality are significantly
difiFerent from the worth trying to sort them out and mark their difhave been dealing with equality and inequality as it enters
last
previous ones, and ference.
We
it is
into the determination of a college admissions policy
that the board might follow.
and
Formulating these rules
certain rules
explicitly,
we
obtain:
(1)
the rule based on the cutoff score on the aptitude tests: appli-
(2)
the rule that
cants not scoring at least 1200 should not be admitted. if it becomes necessary to choose between applione should prefer: the student with the higher aptitude; one color over another, say white over black; the male over the female.
cants, (a)
(b) (c)
two are the reason
Jane, suspecting that the last
down, appeals (3) All
to
still
for her being turned
another rule:
who meet
the required condition (in this case, the
first
above) should be treated equally. All these rules
are prescriptive ones that involve equality
equality, since all lay
down
treating the applicants unequally. Yet the last
the others. (4)
It is
and
in-
a procedure to be followed that results in is
markedly different from
a specification of the general formal rule:
Equals should be treated equally.
Jane claims that rule
(4)
has been violated: she
she has met the condition laid
down
in rule (1),
is John's equal in that but then, by being re-
fused admission, she has not been treated equally.
We
should note also that
all
the rules result in unequal treatment.
qualifying condition stated in the
termining
who
first
The
rule establishes a cutoff point, de-
are to be counted as equals for purposes of admission;
who fail to obtain a score of 1200 are unequal to the others and should be refused admission. In comparison with the rule that equals should be treated equally, which is formal in the sense that it does not those
specify the respect in
which equality
is
to
be judged, the
first is
a sub-
stantive rule.
The
three rules collected under (2) are also substantive. Yet they too
differ significantly
from the
first,
as
is
325
shown by
the fact that one
would
The Status have
to justify
them
in diflFerent
of a Great Idea
ways. The use of a College Board exam-
ination score, apart from the question of whether
would be
justified
it
lives
up
to
along some such grounds as these: that
its
it
claims,
has been
found that students who score lower than a certain minimum usually fail to do satisfactory work; hence that it is better both for the school and the individual not to accept those who fail to reach that minimum score.
But when
we come
to the rules
under
(2),
no such ready
justification is
John has shown that she can qualify for colshould she be refused because (a) she got a slightly lower
available. If Jane as well as
lege work,
why
score or because (b) she
is
a girl or
(c)
because she
A
black?
is
admissions board might attempt a public defense of the
first
college
reason, but
it would be extremely unlikely to admit the other two. But if one did, on what grounds could it do so? Apart from prejudice or idiosyncratic pref-
erence, the reason could only be that having a lower aptitude score or
being a
woman
or black
is
to
be
in fact inferior or less
good
in
some way.
In what way, then, and on what evidence? Knowledge of the fact that
John scored higher than Jane leads to an evaluative judgment concerning them. But it is not immediately evident how or why knowledge of the fact that Jane is a woman and black is evaluative. But even if a woman or a black person is less good than a man and a white person, it still is not clear how such evaluations would justify the rule for admission. Is every evaluation of superiority as such a reason for unequal and preferential treatment? In any context one can make many evaluations. The pertinent question is which are the relevant ones and which are not for the matter at hand.
This example from the world of college admissions indicates some of the complexities involved in the notion of cates the point at
human
equality. It also indi-
which the question of equality and inequality becomes and consequential. That occurs when inequality gets
"exciting," serious,
involved with questions of treatment in matters that concern us deeply,
where
it
keeps
us, in
some way, from obtaining goods we have. As Stanley Benn
realizing aspirations that
ences are rarely called ^inequalities' unless, in the the things which
men
that
we
desire
points out,
first
and
"diflFer-
place, they afiFect
value and for which they compete, like power,
wealth, or esteem." ^^
The example has shown that equality is ascribed in a variety of ways. Benn distinguishes three, which he calls descriptive, evaluative, and distributive. The descriptive judgment presupposes, he writes, "an ordering of objects according to some common natural property or attribute that can be possessed in varying degrees." As examples, he cites two cabbages being of equal weight, two knives equally sharp. This ascrip43 "Egalitarianism and the Equal Consideration of
326
Interests,"
NIX,
p. 64.
The Idea
of Equality
what we have called an equality of degree. Benn recognizes also give what we have called an equality of type, where "the qualifying condition does not admit of degrees; it may be enough simply to possess the properties necessary to make them members of that class. ... All qualified voters, qua voters, are equal." ^^ So too, in terms of our example, on the college roll all duly admitted students count tion yields
that
it
may
equally as students.
An evaluative judgment involving equality is one that is made "according to some standard of value or merit." Benn's example of this type the judgment that
two
students' essays are "equally good, though their one being detailed and painstaking, the other original and imaginative." But they count as equal because "in a final ordering of all essays, in which some stand high and others low, these two occupy interchangeable places." Benn's third kind of equality, which he calls distributive, is "that of need, entitlement, or desert; the remuneration to which a man is entitled for his work or the dose of medicine he needs for his cough may be equal to another's." ^^ This constitutes what we have called a prescriptive judgment regarding equality, since it concerns the way a person should be treated. This way of ascribing equality differs importantly from the other two in that it necessarily involves three terms: the two things that are compared with regard to equality or inequality and, third, the one or many who are to allot or distribute the dosage or remuneration. The first two judgments demand only two terms: the two, namely, being compared as to being more or less in a certain respect, or evaluated as better or worse. The form of a descriptive judgment is "A is greater than B" that of an evaluative judgment is "A is better than B," whereas the prescriptive statement takes a form such as "C should pay A more than B"; it necessarily involves a reference beyond the two being compared to how a third person should treat them. The question also arises, as we have already seen, regarding how the three judgments are related. Between the descriptive and the evaluative judgment, there is sometimes, but not always, a strictly logical connection. Benn notes that "two knives, equally sharp, equally well-tempered, possessing indeed all relevant properties in the same degree, are equally good knives— sharpness, temper, and the like, being the criteria of a good knife." ^^ By itself, however, a descriptive judgment would not lead to a prescriptive judgment involving equality. Benn points out that the claim of two men to equal pay "depends on a particular convention"— on whether they were being paid for doing equal amounts of work or for is
properties
44 45 46
Ibid., pp. Ibid., pp.
.
.
.
diflFer,
62-64. 62-63.
Ibid., p. 63.
327
The Status
of a Great Idea
working an equal number of hours. In this case, as in our college admissions example, we need a descriptive judgment of how much work was produced, how long the two worked, what scores were obtained on the tests— all cases where one having more than the other makes him of greater value. The judgment that John scored a higher mark than Jane describes a difiFerence in achievement. The judgment that the student with the higher score has greater aptitude for college work
The
is
evaluative.
prescriptive rule that only the student with the higher score should
be admitted supposes the ev^aluation. All three judgments are closely involved with one another. Yet it seems clear that it is only the evaluation that makes this particular description a relevant factor in the determination of a prescriptive rule.
Consider another example. Bodily weight for college admission. is
The statement
is
not a qualifying condition
that John weighs
a descriptive statement regarding inequality. Yet
a situation
where
this
it
more than Jane easy to imagine
statement could lead to an evaluative as well as a
prescriptive judgment, say,
chair because
it is
where John
is
told not to
will not support his weight. is now a relevant factor may sit in the particular
The
sit
in a certain
inequality in weight
how they should but John may not. Again, the statement that John has more money than Jane is descriptive; that he is better oflF is evaluative. It seems to be clearly the case that it is only the evaluative judgment regarding inequality that exerts any force on
between the two be treated. Jane
way
in
determining
chair,
be treated. In other words, it looks as though merely descriptive statements about human equality do not enter immediately into prescriptive considerations. They have to be mediated by evaluations; there has to be something better or worse involved, since otherwise the judgment regarding equality is of no consequence. We make many judgments about inequalities among men that seem to be exclusively descriptive. John may be unequal to Jane in weight, height, blood count, blood pressure, number of chromosomes, color discrimination, tone discrimination, and innumerable other physiological and psychological characteristics that we can measure quantitatively. But, as Plamenatz notes, among the identities and differences of ability and right, there is one kind that "engages our attention so little that we never call them equalities or inequalities," and another "kind that we sometimes attend to and call by these names, although we do not feel strongly about them."^" All the foregoing would seem to fall within one or the the
that John or Jane
is
to
other of these categories.
Even
in the
category of important equalities and inequalities,
not of the same importance, nor are
John
may have
47 Op.
cit.,
all
relevant in
all
a higher scholastic aptitude than Jane, but
p. 82.
328
all
are
circumstances. if
both break
The Idea
of Equality
the law, this fact provides no reason for treating them diifferently.
The
context makes the diflFerence and determines the respect in which equahty
But when these conditions are met, then it seems and exciting equalities are those that affect how we ought to treat men. The emphasis is on prescriptive statements about equality, and descriptive and evaluative judgments enter only as they or inequality
is
relevant.
clear that the important
way upon that judgment. In fact, it is only at this point that becomes an issue in moral and political controversy. If our analysis up to this point has been correct, it now becomes possible to say with greater precision what human equality adds to the notion of generic equality. We found that the judgment that two things are equal implies that there is some respect with regard to which one has neither more nor less than the other. In locating what it is that makes equality important in human affairs, we have also found what is added to, or what specifies, the notion of the more and less. It is that which is more or less in value, more or less in worth, so as to be better or worse. Over and above the denial of the more and less connoted by the notion of generic equality, the assertion of human equality— that is, a judgment involving equality as applying to men and their concerns— connotes an
bear in some equality
The assertion of inequality here, accordingly, consome respect in which one is of greater value than
equality of value.
notes that there another, has
is
more worth,
is
better than the other.
THE CONTROVERSY OVER JUSTIFICATION the contemporary philosophical literature devoted to equality, the Inissue that gives rise to the deepest and most extensive controversy is
that concerning the justification of equality as a principle of action or
rule of behavior.
respect?
The
Why
should
men be
treated equally in this or that
assertion that they should
regarding equality. The question at issue
ment
is
to
be defended and
swers given to
it,
then,
we
justified.
will not
be is
is
a
how
prescriptive
judgment
this prescriptive judg-
In reviewing and reporting the an-
be concerned about descriptive and
evaluative judgments regarding equality except as they are involved in
some way
in the prescriptive
sidered
accordingly, special and not too extensive, as the bibliography
recommendations. This subject of inquiry, although basic and general, is very restricted. The literature to be conis,
indicates.* Limiting our attention to writings that have appeared since the end of the great war, we find that discussion of the subject is confined for the most part to the scholarly journals and to collections resulting from academic conferences and symposia. Two of the latter, in fact, provide most of the material to be reviewed here. One of these collections, from which we have already quoted, is the yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy entitled Nomos IX: Equality, published in 1967 and consisting of eighteen papers. The other, entitled
329
The Status
The contemporary
of a Great Idea
discussion, at
more widespread acceptance for all
greatly from that of
first sight, diflFers
the past as represented in Great Books. In the
first
place, there
of equality as a social
and
men. Indeed, from the philosophical discussion
is
much
political ideal
would appear
it
that equality, at least as an ideal, has triumphed completely. Less than a
century ago, Nietzsche and William Graham Sumner were defending and promoting inequality. Only a generation ago, Nazism was doing the same and trying by force to make inequality prevail. Today, inequality is not much discussed, or defended, as a social and political ideal, although functional inequalities are recognized as necessary in any large organization.
Another distinguishing characteristic of the contemporary discussion the much greater attention that is devoted to the use of the word "equality," and to its grammatical and logical behavior. We have already is
drawn upon this discussion in exhibiting the different ways that equality ascribed, and we will have occasion to return to it in analyzing equality
is
as a rule of procedure.
The recent needs to be
greater concern, certainly greater
literature also reveals
self-consciousness, over the
problem of whether equality
justified as a principle of action; and,
if so,
of treatment
how
this
can be
done. As noted, this problem gives rise to perhaps the sharpest opposition
and the deepest
in dispute, this
one
division in the entire discussion.
is
most pertinent here, since
it
Of
the several issues
also serves to indicate
and emphasize the underlying unity of the entire discussion of equality since it began with the ancient Greeks. Although the discussion now has a somewhat different form, it still turns on an issue that has been constantly present, namely, the issue regarding the specific equality of as
men and
its
the dispute
On
is
men
import. In fact, the question that most frequently focuses the interpretation of the statement that
the issue of justification, three different
be distinguished. The question of
all
men
and opposed
justification
itself— that
are equal.
positions can is,
whether
equality of treatment in a certain respect needs to be justified— serves to
One group consists of those authors who deny that the principle of equality needs justification and assert instead that, if any principle needs to be justified by reference to a further or prior principle, it is not equality but inequality. Opposed to this group are all authors who hold that equality of treatment needs to be, and can divide authors into two groups.
be, justified Aspects of
by appeal
Human
Symposium
to another principle, or principles.
Equality, collects the nineteen papers prepared for the Fifteenth and Religion (1956).
of the Conference on Science, Philosophy,
Only a few authors have ^iven book-lenjj;th treatment to equality. Many books on value or general ethics, however, include discussions of the idea. Then too, books in the field of practical politics often include some formal analysis as a part of a plea for or against the extension of equalitarian political and social policies; The Future of Socialism (1963) by C. A. R. Crosland is an example.
330
' like
began
to exist
wher-
ever a family held together instead of separating at the death of its patriarchal chieftain. In most of the Greek states and in Rome there long remained the vestiges of an ascending series of groups out of which the state was at first constituted. The family, house, and tribe of the Romans may be taken as a type of them, and they are so described to us that we can scarcely help conceiving
it
cannot
a very simple explanation
that communities
to
we
would be
if we could base a general conclusion on the hint furnished us by the scriptural example already adverted to, and could suppose
man could not have imagined what we mean by a nation. We
is
does not
Henry Maine has
of the origin of society
Again, the primitive
whom
distinct, history
this point Sir
when we cannot
effort drive out of
notion of law, of
to
step from no polity to polity
of
418
Bagehot: Physics and Politics theory— is an adequate account of the true origin of politics. I shall in a subsequent essay show that there are, as it seems to me, abundant evidences of a time still older than that which he speaks of. But
them as a system of concentric circles which have gradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group the family, connected by common is subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation of families forms
the theory of Sir
the gens, or house. The aggregation of houses makes the tribe. The aggregation of tribes constitutes the commonwealth. Are we at liberty to follow these indications, and to lay down that the commonwealth is a collection of persons united by common descent from the progenitor of an original family? Of
we may
our present politics, and the conclusion have drawn from it will be strengthened, not weakened, when we come to examine and deal with an age yet older, and a
bond far more rudimentary. But when once polities were begun, there is no difficulty in explaining why they lasted. Whatever may be said against social
the principle of "natural selection" in other
departments, there
dominance
as
that,
for
time as the basis of
common
of
po-
litical action.
theory were true, the origin would not seem a great change,
If this
politics
in early days,
The primacy
be
of or,
to
down
of the elder brother, in tribes
would
be
slight.
It
it
would be the beginning of much, but it would be nothing in itself. It would beto take an illustration from the opposite end of the pohtical series— it would be like the
headship
leader
over
of
a
who may
of
eignty
The
it
that
we
should rather
even a single vestige lasting the age when for picturesqueness
to
became valuable
bious,
we
are
in poetry.
upon the
Englishman who comes nowadays totle or Plato
is
of
of the pres-
ervation of politics. Perhaps e\ery
divide
du-
is
firma
terra
when we speak
actual records
weak parliamentary
adherents
pre-
at
But, though the origin of polity
moment. It was the germ sovereignty; it was hardly yet sover-
from him
was
perish
wonder
really a great change.
cohesive,
casually
its
history.
And I need not pause to prove that any form of polity is more efficient than none; that an aggregate of families owning even a slippery allegiance to a single head would be sure to have the better of a set of families acknowledging no obedience to anyone, but scattering loose about the world and fighting where they stood. Homer's Cyclops would be powerless against the feeblest band; so far from its being singular that we find no other record of that state of man, so unstable and sure
local contiguity— estahlishes itself for the first
no doubt of
human
could.
in politi-
instance,
is
early
in
strongest killed out the weakest, as they
cal functions; nor is there any of those subversions of feeling, which we term emphatically revolutions, so startling and so complete as the change which is accomplished when some other prin-
ciple—such
and
I
except this for their holding together in political union. The history of political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole
community
my
serves
describes,
to
at least
possible ground of
It
truly describes, a kind of life antecedent
be certain, that all ancient societies regarded themselves as having proceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under an incapacity for comprehending any reason this
Henry Maine
purpose well.
present
\oung
to Aris-
struck with their conserv-
atism: fresh from the liberal doctrines of
in a
the present age, he wonders at finding in those recognized teachers so
itself.
much
con-
They both— unlike as they are— hold with Xenophon— so unlike both—
do not myself believe that the suggestion of Sir Henry Maine— for he does not, it will be seen, offer it as a confident
trary teaching.
I
that
419
man
is
the "hardest of
all
animals to
Great Books Library
Of
govern."
Plato
plausibly said
might indeed
it
be
commonly been prone
to conservatism in
government; but Aris-
totle,
What
liberal, if
anyone ever was
In fact, both of these
when men had
men
a
lived
not "had time to forget"
them
altogether.
the basis of our culture,
We
We
which
governability,
between spiritual penalties and must never be awakened. Indeed, early Greek thought or early Roman thought would never have comprehended it. There was a kind of rough public opinion and there were rough, very rough, hands which acted on it. We now talk of political penalties and ecclesiastical prohibition, and the social censure, but they were all one then. Nothing is very like those old communities now, but perhaps a "trades union" is as near as most things; to work cheap is thought to be a "wicked" thing, and so some Broadhead puts it down.
legal penalties
philosophers
to get as a principal result of their
In early times the quantity of govern-
much more important than its What you want is a comprehensive rule binding men together, making them do much the same things, telling is
quality.
them what to expect of each other— fashthem alike, and keeping them so. What this rule is does not matter so much. A good rule is better than a bad one, but
ioning
any rule
is
The
better than none; while, for
which a jurist will appreciate, none can be very good. But to gain that rule, what may be called the impressive elements of a polity are incomparably more useful elements.
its
get the obedience of
men
is
How
To
gain
that
obedience,
Church and
the
used
to
preach that
was the great cure
this
created
"hereditary
the
to
forbids
is
free thought is not an evil; or though an evil, it is the necessar\
basis for the greatest good; for
making the mold
it
is
necessary
of civilization,
and
from
hardening the soft fiber of early man. The first recorded history of the Aryan
Roman
race shows everywhere a king, a council,
State. Dr. Arnold, fresh
the study of Greek thought and
are to be sub-
which science teaches to be essential, and which the early instinct of men saw to be essential too. That this regime
primary
we now
life
drill"
the identity—not the union,
but the sameness— of what
history,
gradually
that
rather,
is
to
mitted to a single rule for a single object;
less critical.
condition
is
called a cake of cus-
tom. All the actions of
the hard prob-
lem; what you do with that obedience
object of such organizations
what may be
create
reasons
important than
a single govern-
because they are the same. The idea of
culture. We take without thoughts as a datum, what they hunted as a quaesitum.
ment
is
it
difference
upon an amount
these
there requisite
was excellent it was learnt.
have
of order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive
hoped
it
reckon, as
the difficulties of government. forgotten
was applied,
world from which
Church or State, as you likeregulating the whole of human life. No division of power is then endurable without danger— probably without destmction; the priest must not teach one thing and the king another; king must be priest, and prophet king: the two must say the same,
ophy, ought, according to that doctrine, to liberal.
is
ment—call
the founder of the experience philos-
have been a
it
for the old
intuitive philosophy, being "the tories of
speculation," have
which
to
adherents of an
the
that
call
and, as the necessity of early conflicts re-
identity
misguided modern world. But he spoke to ears filled with other sounds and minds filled with other thoughts, and they hardly knew his mean-
much prominence and much power. That there could be in
quired, the king in
for the
with
such ages anything
like
an oriental despo-
Caesarean despotism, was impossible; the outside extra-political arm\ tism, or a
much less heeded it. But though the teaching was wrong for the modern age ing,
which
420
maintains
them
could
not
exist
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
when
was the
the tribe
men
the
all
Hence,
in the
nation,
and when
time of Homer, in the first
Germany, the king
the most visible part
he
is
we
times of ancient
the most useful.
The
close
lapsed from their law melted the
garchy, the patriciate, which alone could the fixed law, alone could apply the
fixed
law,
which was recognized
as
want.
It
ligion
the
upon the
It is
first
when
all else
was unfixed
tell
to
these
principles
firmed by Jewish history
is
are
be discovered
his fixity that jurists
"contract"
title
hardly
is
mod-
in the oldest law. In
all
they do. But
in early
The guiding
rule was the law of Everybody was born to a place in the community: in that place he had to stay: in that place he found certain duties which he had to fulfill, and which were all he needed to think of. The net of custom caught men in distinct spots, and kept each where he stood. What are called in European politics the principles of 1789 are therefore inconsist-
thing.
status.
Rome
and Sparta were drilling aristocracies, and succeeded because they were such. Athens was indeed of another and higher order, at least to us instructed moderns who know her and have been taught by her. But to the "Philistines" of those days Athens was of a lower order. She was beaten; she lost the great visible game which is all that shortsighted contemporaries know. She was the great "free failure" of the ancient world. She began, she announced, the good things that were to come; but she was too weak to display and enjoy them; she was trodden down by those of coarser make and better-trained frame.
How much
connected with
us that the
determines nearly
would be schoolboyish to explain at how well the two great republics, the two winning republics of the ancient these conclusions.
the
in
times that choice determined scarcely any-
life.
It
embody
meaning
a
break up the binding
ern days, in civilized days, men's choice
length
world,
is
to
has
and, re-
which was what men wanted in that and inventive minds always dislike it. But the Jews who adhered to their law became the Jews of the day, a nation of a firm set if ever there was one.
monarchy, but perhaps because he so much loves historic Athens he has not sympathized with pre-historic Athens. He has not shown us the need of life
there
into
Liberal";
"first
He began
away
Jeroboam
age, though eager
it alone could drill. Mr. Grote has admirably described the
a fixed
nations.
polity
alone was obeyed;
face of the
apart,
phrase.
command over the primary social alone knew the code of drill; it
rise of the primitive oligarchies
neighboring
been called the
authorized custodian of the fixed law, had
then sole
should speak) were never at peace, and agreed. And the ten tribes who
never
oli-
know
asked for a king,
the spiritual and the secular powers (as
because for momentary wel-
of the polity,
fare
is
tive in unity. After they
first
times of Rome, in the
was indeed defec-
of nations. Their polity
the tribe were warriors.
in
ent with the early world; they are fitted
only to the
new world
has gone through
its
inherited organization
and
fixed;
when
which society
in
early task; is
when
the
already confirmed
the soft minds and strong
passions of youthful nations are fixed and
guided by hard transmitted
instincts. Till
then not equality before the law sary
but
wanted
con-
is
is
neces-
inequality,
for
what
an elevated
elite
who know
most
is
the
law: not a good government seeking the
obvious. There
was doubtless much else in Jewish history —whole elements with which I am not here concerned. But so much is plain. The Jews were in the beginning the most unstable of nations; they were submitted to their law, and ihey came out the most stable
happiness of
its
subjects, but a dignified
and overawing government getting its subjects to obey: not a good law, but a comprehensive law binding all life to one routine.
Later are the ages of freedom;
are the ages of servitude. In 1789,
421
first
when
Great Books Library
men
the great
of the Constituent
Assembly
in
On
their very physical organi-
mark
zation the hereditary
was
of old
times
monotony had
men
their use, for they trained
when
for ages
they need not be mo-
notonous.
many
it
was
great respects in Chaucer's time as
in Elizabeth's
present
the
is
IV
we have
But
up" men
men
in groups, not only
often,
at
gested,
least
if
We
is
be
sure,
phenomena
at
more, as
completely and perfectly they seem to
at first
how
framed;
slowly,
be altered
how
writer
they can one analo-
may help us to see, at how such phenomena are
and
all.
But there
is
if
its
gous fact which least
dimly,
caused. There
is
peculiarity of each began,
when and how
and
study,
type,
and gives it its charm It was not Addison
perfection.
the
essay- writing it
man who
forward
Some
of
was the
struck
Queen vigor-
out
the
thus
it,
and
whom
posterity reads.
strong writer, or group of writers, seizes
on the public mind,
and a
curious process soon assimilates other writers in appearance to them. To some extent, no doubt, this assimilation is effected by a process most intelligible, and not at all
we
curious— the process of conscious imitation; A sees that B's style of writing answers,
but probably even in the minds
who know
its
elaborated
also exactly
that
or less accurate in proportion as
car-
rough notion, though it was the wise and meditative man who improved upon it and
mental peculiarity passed away. We have an idea of Queen Anne's time, for example, or of Queen Elizabeth's time, or George II's time; or again of the age of Louis XIV, or Louis XV, or the French Revolution; an idea
more
whom
remembers— not the one who
ideal
ous
as
This
sort.
the style of the age farthest towards
who began
we have full histories of many such periods, we can examine exactly when and how the mental and
any other
Anne's time, but Steele;
a character of ages, as
well as of nations;
than
very often not the one
is
posterity
grad-
ries
at
surely this
believe— congenial to the minds
I
around him
of national character:
ually they can alone be altered,
it:
singular.
thing like
cannot attempt to explain— all the
singular
how
am
marked variety what is
The tme explanation is, I think, somethis. One considerable writer gets a sort of start because what he writes is somewhat more— very often, only a little
use the expression, na-
cannot yet explain— I
this
have
think,
expression, pervading
then written and peculiar to
impressed on usages, but
common
tional character.
least, I
human
of
an indirect way, sug-
in
may
I
there
is
I
arises a special literature, a
They not only "bound
a certain set of
point— why
Everyone must,
been puzzled about it. Suddenly, in a quiet time— say, in Queen Anne's time-
not realized the
those early polities and
full benefit of
those early laws.
time or Anne's time,
now. But some qualities were this common element in one era
is
it
variable?
even yet
more simple, more
truth
added to and some in another; some qualities seemed to overshadow and eclipse it in one era, and others in another. We overlook and half forget the constant while we see and watch the variable. But— for that
were hardened and were steadied by the trans-
mitted results of tedious usages. The ages of
in
or as
fixed; their brains
their nerves
the
aside too
it
themselves.
special,
was. We throw much, in making up our images of eras, that which is common to all eras. The English character was much the same
unique than
which could be praised, or admired, or imitated: all seemed a blunder —a complex error to be got rid of as soon as might be. But that error had made anything
more
nutely,
looked on the long past, they hardly saw
these ages best and most mi-
and he imitates
422
it.
But definitelv aimed
Bagehot: Physics and Politics mimicry
like this
men who
is
like their
willingly clothe
cramps great writers
always rare; original
own
them
thoughts do not
to suit
words they
who was
in
feel
No man, indeed, can think when he is studying to purpose much
write a style not his own. After
few men are
at
all
all,
equal to the steady
the
known
and only
A
his
strict,
I
genius will
fall
will
gratify
own
words.
was going act
thus,
to say a Puritan,
but most
men
of
One very
into the style of their age.
unapt at the assimilating process, but on that account the more curious about it, says:
How we Track a livelong day, great heaven, and watch our shadows! What our shadows seem, forsooth,
we
of an age
Do
I
will ourselves be.
look like that? that:
any more than a writer tries to write in a journal in which the style is uncongenial or impossible to him. Indeed if he mistakes he is soon weeded out; the editor rejects, the age will
then
I
it,
What
5 Lyrical style
359.
423
am
You think me that.
writers are expected to write, they
write; or else they
not read his compositions. traditional
he
habits of association; that
genius are susceptible and versatile, and
unless he feels, or fancies he feels, a sort
this
an author makes a
worth goes on to explain that he himself can't and won't do what is expected from him, but that he will write his own words,
he would
was what he wanted. Exactly in way, just as a writer for a journal without a distinctly framed purpose gives the readers of the journal the sort of words and the sort of thoughts they are used to— so, on a larger scale, the writers of an age, without thinking of it, give to the readers of the age the sort of words and the sort of thoughts— the special literature, in fact —which those readers like and prize. And not only does the writer, without thinking, choose the sort of style and meaning which are most in vogue, but the writer is himself chosen. A writer does not begin to
painfully
writing in verse
and in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Pope."^ And then, in a kind of vexed way, Words-
that
How
of
ample, in the age of Catullus, Terence, or
this
of aptitude for writing
effort.
Lucretius, and that of Statins or Claudian;
to force himself in order not to write
rhythm
is
excited very different expectations; for ex-
readers of the journal are used, but he
write in the traditional
own. But he did so
he not only then apprizes the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully eschewed. The exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must, in different ages of literature, have
write the traditional style to which the
it if
it
supposed," he says, "that by the act
"It
certain
each paper while he is writing for it, and changes to the tone of another when in turn he begins to write for that. He probably would rather
it;
style of his
formal engagement that
of
does not set himself to copy
bold enough to break through
frame a
to
style catches the tone of
have
happens not
knowingly, and he did so with an
very
stupid and mistaken labor making a style. Most men catch the words that are in the air, and the rhythm which comes to them they do not know from whence; an unconscious imitation determines their words, and makes them say what of themselves they would never have thought of saying. Everyone who has written in more than one newspaper knows how invariably his labor,
mostly,
it
and, at the risk of contemporary neglect,
they borrow. to
whom
curiously seen in Wordsworth,
is
Ballads,
do not write
Preface;
see
at all; but.
above,
p.
Great Books Library dis-
nervous organization are useful in contin-
couraged, hve disheartened, and die leav-
and also are promoted by it. These traits seem to be arising in Australia, too, and wherever else the English race is placed in like circumstances. But even in
like
the writer of these
Hnes,
stop
ual struggle,
ing fragments which their friends treasure,
but which a rushing world never heeds.
The Nonconformist
writers are neglected,
the Conformist writers are encouraged, un-
these useful particulars the innate tend-
perhaps on a sudden the fashion shifts. And, as with the writers, so in a less de-
ency of the human mind to become like what is around it has effected much; a sluggish Englishman will often catch the eager American look in a few years; an Irishman or even a German will catch it, too, even in all English particulars. And as
til
gree with readers.
Many men— most menwhich
get to like or think they like that
is
ever before them, and which those around
them
and which received opinion says like; or, if their minds are too marked and oddly made to get into the like,
mold, they give up reading altogether, or
hundred minor points— in so many mark the typical Yankee— usefulness has had no share either in their
read old books and foreign books, formed
origin or their propagation.
under another code and appealing
of
they ought to
The
ferent taste.
a
to
that go to
The accident some predominant person possessing them set the fashion, and it has been imi-
to a dif-
principle of "elimination,"
the "use and disuse" of organs which nat-
tated to this day.
works here. What is used strengthens; what is disused weakens: "to those who have, more is given"; and so a sort of style settles upon an age, and im-
will
speak
uralists
of,
more than anything else memories becomes all that
printing itself
men's
thought of about I
believe
that
in
that
principal force in the characters; but
character colonial
from
arose fife- the
the
difficulty
of
mit that a
of
struggling
with the wilderness;
and this type has mass of characters because the mass of characters have unconsciously imitated it. Many of the Amergiven
ican
its
shape
life,
The eager
are plainly
useful
and consequent on such a restlessness, the highly
I
making
of national
have already said more
it
is
a great force in the matter,
principal
efficacy
of the
and the
tight
early
polity
(so
to
law on the creation of corporate characters. These settled the predominant type, a sort of model, speak)
to the
characteristics
such a
be
agency to be acknowledged and watched; and for my present purpose I want no more. I have only to show the
type of
difficulties
to
more-
about it than I need. Everybody who weighs even half these arguments will ad-
national characters are being made in own time. In America and in Australia new modification of what we call Angloof
little
than other districts, and so set yoke on books and on society. I could enlarge much on this, for I believe this unconscious imitation to be the
our
sort
which came
cases but a
its
new
A
of the district
is,
influential
men to imitate what is before and to be what they are expected to be, molded men by that model. This is, I think, the very process by which
growing.
but the successful parish charthe national speech is but
as
more— in many
their eyes,
is
is
just
the successful parish dialect, the dialect,
the same
the strongest
Saxonism
in
which
character
is
way. At first a sort of "chance predominance" made a model, and then invincible attraction, the necessity which rules all but
a
inquires
England, and even
accident,
national
call
much
Anybody who
arose, no doubt, from some old and have been heedfully preserved by customary copying. A national ties
acter;
what we
in
these days of assimilation, parish peculiari-
it.
character arose in very
even
find
made
in
strict
early
a sort of idol; this
was worshiped, all manner of
copied, and observed, from
life.
mingled
strung
424
feelings, but
most of
all
because
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
was the "thing to do," the then accepted form of human action. When once the predominant type was determined, the copyit
ing propensity of
man
ascribing
tradition
did the
rest.
which seem
better.
languages
a rascal," says the saying;
it
The
communities when the sudden impact new thoughts and new examples breaks down the compact despotism of the single consecrated code, and leaves pliant and
manner
in
foreigners to touch
rightly
appreciate the dislike which old govern-
self
all
the
old
times; they implied real differences of the
goes on:
speaking ironically and in the spirit of modern times— "Well, indeed, might the
It is not then to be wondered at that Thucydides, when speaking of a city
Egypt
founded jointly by lonians and Dorians, should have thought it right to add "that the prevailing institutions of the two were Ionian," for according as they were derived from one or the other the prevailing type would be different. And
and India endeavour to divert their people from becoming familiar with the sea, and represent the occupation of a seaman as incompatible with the purity of the highest castes. The sea deserved to be hated by it
therefore the mixture of persons of dif-
has
Men it
is
ancy, tended to confuse of
what
is
before their eyes,
present all
of
which are
the relations
near a relation as that differences
of fellow-citizens
main points
human
of
life,
upon the led
to
a
general carelessness and scepticism, and encouraged the notion that right and wrong had no real existence, but were mere creatures of human opinion.
if
But
only one
equal and some
all
and all men's notions of and wrong; or by compelling men life,
to tolerate in so
among many things— one competitor among othit if it is
human
right
before their eyes alone, but they do
not imitate
ers,
unless one race
so formidable as foreign intercourse.
imitate
same commonwealth, had a complete ascend-
ferent race in the
been the mightiest instrument in the civilisation of mankind." But the old oligarchies had their own work, as we now know. They were imposing a fashioning yoke; they were making the human nature which after-times employ. They were at their labors; we have entered into these labors. And to the unconscious imitation which was their principal tool, no impediment
was
elsewhere in a remarkable essay— for
most important kind, religious and moral." And after exemplifying this at length he
acted in this respect upon the philosophers' maxims. "Well," said Dr. Arnold-
the old aristocracies, inasmuch as
it.
was his last on Greek history, his farewell words on a long-favorite subject— "were not of that odious and fantastic character which they have been in modem
governments
policy of the old priest-nobles of
oligarchies
it
source of corruption as naturally as a modem economist considers it the spring of
and
old
"Distinctions of race," says Arnold him-
ments had toward trade. There must have been something peculiar about it, for the best philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, shared it. They regarded commerce as the
industry,
The
religion.
wanted to keep their type perfect, and for that end they were right not to allow
which national characters
we can
he then is— to
as
guidance by hereditary morality and he-
only after duly apprehending the
thus form themselves that
man— such
impressible
follow his unpleasant will without distinct
reditary
silent
and
rightly represents the feeling of primi-
of
kept. is
"Whoever speaks two
tive
Spartan legishition to
Lycurgus was Hterally untrue, but its spirit was quite tme. In the origin of states strong and eager individuals got hold of small knots of men, and made for them a fashion which they were attached to and It
is
if
425
so,
Commerce
ideas,
this
and brings
of
be
this
right.
breaking it
the
oligarchies
were
brings this mingling of
down
inevitably. It
of old creeds, is
nowadays
its
Great Books Library good that it does so; the change what we call "enlargement of mind."
greatest is
But
in
early times Providence "set apart
the nations"; and their morals
mitted
is
it
not
till
that
trans-
such enlargement
can be borne. The ages of isolation had their use, for they trained men for ages when they were not to be isolated.
2.
then
the frame of
by long ages of
set
discipline
is
compelled to think-such advance to be inevitable, natural, and eternal. Why ibly
THE USE OF CONFLICT
difference between progression and The stationary inaction,"
says one of our
"is one of the great which science has yet to penetrate." I am sure I do not pretend that I can completely penetrate it; but it undoubtedly seems to me that the problem is on the verge of solution, and that scientific successes in kindred fields by analogy suggest some principles which wholly remove many of its difficulties, and indicate the sort of way in which those which remain may hereafter be removed too. But what is the problem? Common English—I might perhaps say common civi-
is
this great contrast?
Before gate
we
more
we must No doubt
can answer,
accurately.
investi-
history
shows that most nations are stationary now; but it affords reason to think that all nations once advanced. Their progress was arrested at various points; but nowhere, probably not even in the hill tribes of India, not even in the Andaman Islanders, not even in the savages of Terra del Fuego, do we find men who have not got some way. They have made their little progress in a hundred different ways; they have framed with infinite assiduity a hundred
they
greatest living writers,
curious
secrets
screwed themselves into the uncomfortable corners of a complex life, which is odd and dreary, but yet is possible. And the corners are never the same in any two
lized—thought ignores
to
make
Our habitual
have,
to
say,
Our record begins with thousand unchanging edifices, but it shows traces of previous building. In hisparts of the world.
a
toric times there
in
has been times
pre-historic
little
there
progress;
must
have
been much. In solving, or trying to solve, the question,
we must
take notice of this remark-
able difference, and explain
in-
so
it,
too; or else
our ordinary conversation, our
we may be
and ineradicable prejudices tend
and perhaps altogether unBut what then is that solution, or what are the principles which tend towards it? Three laws, or approximate laws, may, I think, be laid down, with only one of which I can deal in this paper, but all three of which it will be best to state, that it may be seen what I am aiming at.
structors,
inevitable
it.
habits;
us think that "Progress"
is
incomplete,
sound.
the
normal fact in human society, the fact which we should expect to see, the fact which we should be surprised if we did not see. But history refutes this. The ancients had no conception of progress; they did not so
much
as reject the idea:
sure our principles are utterly
they
did not even entertain the idea. Oriental
1)
In every particular state of the world,
those nations which are strongest tend to
same now. Since history began they have always been what they are. Savages, again, do not improve; they hardly seem to have the basis on which to build, much less the material to put up anything worth having. Only a few nations, and those of European origin, advance; and yet these think— seem irresist-
nations are just the
and
prevail
over
marked
peculiarities the strongest tend to
the
others;
in
certain
be the best. 2) Within every particular nation the type or types of character then and there most attractive tend to prevail; and the most attractive, though with exceptions, is
426
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
what we most
historic conditions intensified
in
is
by
ex-
trinsic forces,
but in some conditions, such
now
prevailing in the most influ-
as those
part
ential
most conspicuous— I was about to say the most showy— iact in human history. Ancient civilization may be compared with modern in many respects, and plausible arguments constructed to show that it
the best character.
call
Neither of these competitions
3)
of
both
world,
the
are
so
is
These are the which, under the
of
sort
name
and,
every
as
conception tends to advance
and
to
be of use
thought of
when
its
in solving it
was
have conquered Alexander; our Indian army would not think much of
we have become great
the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. And I suppose the improvement has been continuous: I have not the slightest pretense
scientific
boundaries
problems not
to special
essence,
be applied
that the aggregate battle array, so to say, of
human
to
history.
At
first
some objection was
upon
religious grounds;
was
it
as in other cases, the objection
is,
of
these
office;
"By degrees,"
mercenaries
came most
form
to
the
effective, part
Roman
barbarians
catching something of
the manners and culture of their neighbours.
And
thus,
when
the final
movement
came, the Teutonic tribes slowly established themselves through the provinces, knowing something of the system to which they came, and not unwilling to be considered its members." Taking friend and foe together, it may be doubted whether the fighting capacity of the two armies
was not
must use these words in their largest and so as to include every cohering I
and was
armies. The body-guard of had been so composed; the praetorians were generally selected from the bravest frontier troops, most of them Germans." "Thus," he continues, "in many ways was the old antagonism broken down, Romans admitting barbarians to rank and
fell,
as great at last,
as ever
it
was
in the
when
the
Empire
long period while
Empire prevailed. During the Middle Ages the combining power of men often failed; in a divided time you cannot colthe
sense,
deal now; and even as to that
the
Augustus
nation and nation, or tribe and tribe (for
I
of
a most accomplished writer,^ "bar-
of the
I
three princi-
human beings)— that
force
and invariably
true that the ancient civiliza-
largest, or at least the
be kept quite apart except by pedantry. But it is almost exclusively with the first— that of the competition between
aggregate of
It is
barian
ples cannot
I
grown.
says
away; the new principle is more and more seen to be fatal to mere outworks of religion, not to religion itself. At all events, to the sort of application here made of it, which only amounts to searching out and following up an analogy suggested by it, there is plainly no objection. Everyone now admits that human history is guided by certain laws, and all that is here aimed at is to indicate, in a more or less distinct way, an infinitesimally small portion of such laws. discussion
fighting
barbarians had improved.
to
think, passing
The
the
race, has constantly
then destroyed by the barbarians. But the
be expected that so active an idea and so large a shifting of thought would seem to imperil much which men valued. But in this,
mankind,
human
tion long resisted the "barbarians,"
raised to the
principle of "natural selection" in physical
science
knowledge; but, looking at the of the facts, it seems likely
mere surface
started, so here,
what was put forward for mere animal history may, with a change of form, but an identical
in military
disputably
of "natural selec-
tion" in physical science, familiar,
with
doctrines
but you cannot compare the power. Napoleon could in-
better;
two
intensified.
can
can but
down a few principal considerations. The progress of the military art is the
set
6 Mr. Bryce.
427
Great Books Library
many
lect as
But
time.
soldiers as in a concentrated difficulty
this
is
you added up the many
military. If
to
not
political,
have held their ground before the anThere is no lament in any classical
cient.
The New Zea-
writer for the barbarians.
little
hosts of any century of separation, they
landers say that the land will depart from
would perhaps be found equal
their children; the Australians are vanish-
to or greater
than the single host, or the fewer hosts, of previous united.
Taken
as a
Tasmanians have vanished. If this had happened in anthe classical moralists would have
the
ing;
which were more whole, and allowing for
anything
centuries
tiquity,
like
muse over
possible exceptions, the aggregate fighting
been sure
power of mankind has grown immensely, and has been growing continuously since
the large solemn kind of fact that suited
we knew
in
anything about
Again,
force
this
On
them.
it.
to
for
it;
just
is
it
the contrary, in Gaul, in Spain,
Sicily— everywhere that
we know of—
the barbarian endured the contact of the
has tended to con-
conquest of the barbarians,
Roman, and the Roman allied himself to Modern science explains the wasting away of savage men; it says that we have diseases which we can bear,
but only because their imagination was overshadowed and frightened by the old
though they cannot, and that they die away before them as our fatted and pro-
centrate
The
more and more
itself
groups which literati
in fear of a
we
of the last century
new
A
conquests.
in
certain
the barbarian.
call "civilized nations."
very
were forever
tected cattle died out before the rinderpest,
consideration
little
would have shown them that, since the monopoly of military inventions by cultivated states, real and effective military power tends to confine itself to those states. The barbarians are no longer so much as vanquished competitors; they have ceased to compete at all. The military vices, too, of civilization seem to decline just as its military strength
which hardy first
is
innocuous, in comparison, to the
cattle of the Steppes.
much what if
Savages
in the
year of the Christian era were pretty
they were in the 1800th; and
they stood the contact of ancient
civi-
men, and cannot stand ours, it follows that our race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do
lized
bear,
Somehow or other civilization make men effeminate or unwarlike
the seeds of greater diseases than
augments.
those the ancients carried with them.
does not
may
use, perhaps,
as a
meter
now
as
ment
it
once did. There
our fiber— moral,
in
is if
an improvenot physical.
to
fight— seemingly
ous, but as to the
fight;
lost
their
bodily nerve.
But nowadays
in
been growing from the
all
to our history, straight
multitudes wanting nothing but practice
make good
soldiers,
and abounding
in
bravery and vigor. This was so in America;
was so in Prussia; and it would be so in England too. The breed of ancient times was impaired for war by trade and luxury, but the modern breed is not so impaired. A curious fact indicates the same thing it
probably,
if
civilization; they
dubi-
fact there
earliest
is
man
time
no has
on
known
till
Before history began, there was at least as
much
progress in the military art as
there has been since. aries
not certainly. Savages waste
away before modern
exposed.
now. And we must not look at times known by written records only; we must travel back to older ages, known to us only by what lawyers call real evidence— the evidence of things.
countries the great cities could pour out
to
main
is
may be
doubt: the military strength of
mental courage, perhaps
they
their
could not
gauge the vigor of the con-
whose contact he
Particular consequences
In ancient times city people could not be
got
to
stitutions to
We
the unvarying savage
or
superior to the
seem
and the
428
The Roman
legion-
Homeric Greeks were about flint
men
of the shell
implements
as
we
as
mounds
are superior
Bagehot: Physics and Politics them. There has been a constant acquimihtary strength by man since we know anything of him, either by the docu-
II
to
far
sition of
i
By which
speak, that a nation possessed
made
was
to
consequent creation of
men
short-headed
Europe,
all
men
in the
new power.
first
acquire
is
if
I
may
so express
it,
the
is immaterial; a law first— what kind of law is secondary; a person or set of persons to pay deference to—though who he is, or they are, by comparison scarcely signifies. "There is," it has been said, "hardly any exaggerating the difference between civilized and uncivilized men; it is greater than the difference between a tame and a wild animal," because man can improve more. But the difference at first was gained in much the same way. The taming of animals as it now goes on among savage nations, and as travelers who have seen it describe it, is a kind of selection. The most wild are killed when food is wanted, and the most tame and easy to manage kept, because they are more agreeable to human indolence, and so the keeper likes them best. Captain Galton, who has often seen strange scenes of savage and of animal life, had better describe the process:
use of— was invested
Since the long-headed
advantage is that mentioned before— that to
legal fiber; a polity first— what sort of polity
and taken out— in war; all else perished. Each nation tried constantly to be the stronger, and so made or copied the best weapons; by conscious and unconscious imitation each nation formed a type of character suitable to war and conquest. Conquest improved mankind by the intermixture of strengths; the armed truce, which was then called peace, improved them by the competition of training and the
I
greatest
which I drew all the attention I was able by making the first of these essays an essay on "The Preliminary Age." The first thing
ments he has composed or the indications he has left. The cause of this mihtary growth is very plain. The strongest nation has always been conquering the weaker; sometimes even subduing it, but always prevailing over it. Every intellectual gain, so to earliest times
the
drove the
out of the best land in
European history has been the more
history of the superposition of the
military races over the less military— of the
sometimes successful, sometimes of each race to get more military; and so the art of war has constantly improved. But why is one nation stronger than another? In the answer to that, I believe, lies the key to the principal progress of early
efforts,
unsuccessful,
civilization,
and
to
of all civilization.
some
The irreclaimably wild members of every flock would escape and be utterly lost; the wilder of those that remained would assuredly be selected for slaughter whenever it was necessary that one of the flock should be killed. The tamest cattle— those which seldom ran away, that kept the flocks together, and those which led them homeward— would be
of the progress
The answer
is
that there
many advantages— some
small and some great— every one of which tends to make the nation which has it superior to the nation which has it not; that many of are very
preserved alive longer than any of the is, therefore, these that chiefly the parents of stock and bequeath their domestic aptitudes to the future herd. I have constantly witnessed this process of selection among the pas-
others. It
become
these advantages can be imparted to sub-
jugated races, or imitated by competing races;
and
vantages
that,
though some of these ad-
may be
savages of South Africa. I believe be a very important one on account of its rigour and its regularity. It must have existed from the earliest times, and have been in continuous operation, gentoral
perishable or inimitable,
it
on the whole, the energy of civilizagrows by the coalescence of strengths and by the competition of strengths. yet,
tion
429
to
Great Books Library eration
down
generation,
after
to
Australian Ocean, an unapproachable in-
the
present day.^
an inaccessible and undewere beyond its range. In such remote places there was no real
strongest of
all
animals,
sirable hill India,
he was obliged to be he had to tame himself. And the way in which it happened was that the most obedient, the tamest from the
differs
own
his
tribes
rest;
and in them combined men continued to
domesticator;
life,
competition,
stage in the real
the better
man
man— such
half-made
first
inferior
half-
But
exist.
the regions of rivalry— the regions
the strongest and the con-
the
at
are,
struggle of
Africa,
terior
Man, being the
in
where
pressed upon the worse
They died
associations
could
died out in none, and
and history did not begin till after they were gone. The great difficulty which history records is
it.
not that of the
querors. All are very wild then; the animal
not
the savage virtue of the race has
vigor,
all have enough of But what makes one tribe— one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe— to differ from an-
other
The
second
their relative faculty of coherence.
is
slightest
symptom
last.
first
What
step.
out,
but that of the most evident is not
step, is
the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but
of legal develop-
getting out of a fixed law; not of cement-
upon
ment, the least indication of a military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The
ing (as
compact
cake of custom; not of making the
tribes win,
and the compact
it)
tribes
a former occasion
I
phrased
a cake of custom, but of breaking the first
are the tamest. Civilization begins, because
preservative habit, but of breaking through
the beginning of civilization
it,
is
a military
advantage.
Probably
if
we had
power had
set
some superhuman down the thoughts and ac-
arrested
though differing
civilization,
the "Cyclopes"
as
if
And
not to pause.
from without would say they were likeK
the least coherent only remain in the
near
the
we may
The reason
is
doubtless, of the ante-historic civilizations
by nature
were not far off. From this center the conquering swarm— ior such it is— has grown and grown; has widened its subject territories steadily, though not equably, age by age. But geography long defied it. An Atlantic Ocean, a Pacific Ocean, an
organisms.
to
man's organism as
p.
Society's
Transactions,
to all other
law of which we know no reason, but which is among the first b> which Providence guides and governs the world, there is a tendency in descendants to be like their progenitors, and yet a tendency also in descendants to differ from
By
a
their progenitors.
Ill
that only those nations
can progress which preserve and use the fundamental peculiarity which was given
Ordinary civilization begins Mediterranean Sea; the best,
7 Ethnological
in nearly all
They look when there was no pausing— when a mere observer
reason for
them.
large
they had paused
—have been cleared away long before there was an authentic account of them.
call
A
other things, are in this alike.
of the next step. All the abso-
"protected" parts of the world, as
civilizations.
world seems to have been ready to advance to something good— to have prepared all the means to advance to something good— and then to have stopped, and not advanced. India, Japan, China, almost every sort of Oriental
men ages before they could set them down for themselves— we should know that this first step in civilization was the hardest step. But when we come to history as it is, we are more struck with the
men— all
better.
the precise case with the whole
part, a very large part, of the
tions of
lutely incoherent
is
family of
historic records of
the ante-historic ages— if
difficulty
and reaching something This
The work of nature in is a patchwork— part
making generations
Vol.
resemblance, part contrast. In certain re-
137.
430
Bagehot: Physics and Politics spects each born generation
is
is
not like the
born; and in certain other respects
last
But the peculiarity of
like the last.
rested civilization
world"; the spectacle of nature dread.
were powers behind
ar-
to kill out varieties at
is
awe and
with
it
filled
them
They fancied
there
which must be
it
pleased, soothed, flattered, and this very
We
almost— that is, in early childhood, and before they can develop. The fixed custom which public opinion alone tolerates is imposed on all minds, whether it
often in a
them or not. In that case the community feel that this custom is the only shelter from bare tyranny, and the only security for what they value. Most Oriental communities live on land which in theory is the property of a despotic sovereign, and neither they nor their families could have
change anything else; and accordingly we have religions "of the ages" (it is Mr.
birth
suits
the elements
all
Land
in that state of society
is
sary of
life,
and,
all
of his holding
and must leases
die.
is
And
(for
world,
world without
then possible— usage.
how
too plain
men
cling
to
And
it is
It
to
vestiges
of
fear.
the secu-
This
is
the archaic part of that
we
look at as so ancient;
as to us, or
more
so.
How
this
was in all living detail, though we make, and the ancients then made, an artistic use of the more attractive bits of it— weighed on man, the
religion— for
great
poem
of
nineteenth-century
such
it
Lucretius,
poem
tiquity, brings before us
of
most
the
any
in
an-
with a feeling so
vivid as to be almost a feeling of our own.
Yet the classical religion
of that early, bare, pain-
full
of.
them
terrible
is
a
mild and
tender specimen of the preserved religions.
Not only had they no comfort,
was
all
antecedent, which were as unintelligible
such places and periods customs because customs
To
no convenience, not the very beginnings of an epicurean life, but their mind within was as painful to them as the world without.
they
hardly altered, perhaps, from times long
but
them and starvation. more powerful cause co-operated, if a cause more powerful can be imagined. Dryden had a dream of an early age, "when wild in woods the noble savage ran"; but "when lone in woods the cringing savage crept" would have been more
ful period.
than
an "antiquity" which descended to them,
in
we know
common maxims, and
very world which
still
like all
slowly
their
thought
alone stand between
A
more
mythology tedious." In that which is so like our modern world in so many things, so much more like than many far more recent, or some that live beside us, there is a part in which we seem to have no kindred, which we stare at, of which we cannot think how it could be credible, or how it came to be
House of Commons among Andaman Islanders. Only one check, one sole shield for life and is
Men change
cultivation.
old world,
writing and without reading as a
good,
the
"finds
turned out this
great
thoughts have long been dead. "Every reader of the classics," said Dr. Johnson,
our notion of written
as out of place in a
is
is
turned out of
religions
life,
the unincreasable land
man who
of
their
lar
but a petty skilled minority) a neces-
being occupied, a
races
even among
religions,
who so calls them)— of the "ages before morality"; of ages of which the civil
they held the land upon some sort of fixed terms.
of hideous ways.
Jowett
decent existence unless
of
number
have too many such
get at the worst, you should look
where
the destroying competition has been least— at
America,
was
So far as the
inform us, they were afraid of
rare,
and
where a
sectional
civilization
pervading coercive
civili-
zation did not exist; at such religions as
everything; they were afraid of animals,
those of the Aztecs.
by near tribes, and of possible inroads from far tribes. But, above all things, they were frightened of "the
At first sight it seems impossible to imagine what conceivable function such awful religions can perform in the economy
of certain
attacks
431
Great Books Library
And no one can fully explain But one use they assuredly had: they fixed the yoke of custom thoroughly on mankind. They were the prime agents of the era. They put upon a fixed law a sanction so fearful that no one could dream of not conforming to it.
make? And then the
of the world.
to
them.
Mr. Harrison and Mr. Beesly,
No one
comprehend the
will ever
no law
and lived
at all,
in
confused
to
to introduce here an imitation of the Napoleonic system, a dictatorship founded on the proletariat— who can doubt that if
is,
both these clever writers had been real
Frenchmen they would have been
ar-
anti-Bonapartists,
men had
of early society. Either
who want
"Frenchify the English institutions"— that
rested civilizations unless he sees the strict
dilemma
secular Comtists,
writers
is
to
now? The wish of these very natural. They want to
Cayenne long
tribes,
irascible
and have been sent
ere
who
hardly hanging together, or they had to
"organize society," to erect a despot
law by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted
do what they like, and work out their ideas; but any despot will do what he himself likes, and will root out new ideas ninety-nine times for once that he introduces them. Again, side by side with these Comtists, and warring with them— at least with one of them— is Mr. Arnold, whose poems we know by heart, and who has, as much as any living Englishman, the genuine literary impulse; and yet even he wants to put a yoke upon us— and, worse than a political yoke, an academic yoke, a yoke upon our minds and our styles. He, too, asks us to imitate France; and what else can we say than what the two most thorough French-
obtain
a
that difficulty soon destroyed lay in their
way who
all
did not.
those that
And
then
they themselves were caught in their
The customary
yoke.
terrible sanctions,
sanctions,
and
own
which
discipline,
could only be imposed on any early
by
will
fixed
men
continued with those out
killed
of
whole which
the
society the propensities to variation are the principle of progress.
Experience shows cult
it is
to get
men
how
but
in practice the old
error—
the error which arrested a hundred
Men
zations—returns again. of their
own
life,
pleteness of their
the pain of
new
diffi-
encourage the They will admit it
principle of originality. in theory,
incredibly
really to
civili-
men
are too fond
too credulous of the com-
own
ideas, too
angry
Dans
at
thoughts, to be able to
new ideas, they want to enthem on mankind— to make them heard, and admitted, and obeyed before, having
mais regoit tout d'abord Chapelain et Conrart. De meme nous voyons a T Academic Grecque le vicomte invite, Corai repousse, lorsque Jormard y entre conime dans un moulin.^
simple competition with other ideas,
they would ever be so naturally. At this
very
moment
there
are
Comtists teaching that
the
most
we ought
rigid
be governed by a hierarchy— a combination of savans orthodox in science. Yet who can doubt that Comte would have been hanged to
8 "In any body of talent no distinction gives offence except one of talent. A duke and peer honors the Academie Frangaise, which will not have Boileau, refuses La Bruyere, keeps Voltaire waiting, and yet immediately receives Chapelain and Conrart. So
own hierarchy; that his essor matewhich was in fact troubled by the "theologians and metaph\'sicians" of the Polytechnic School, would have been more impeded by the government he wanted by
corps a talent, nulle distinction
fait
refuse la Bruyere, fait attendre Voltaire,
force
in
les
ombrage, si ce n'est pas cclle du talent. Un due et pair honore V Academie Frangaise, qui ne veut point de Boileau, ne
bear easily with a changing existence; or else,
of the last age did say?
his
riel,
too, the Academie Grecque invited the vicomte, turned down Corai, while Jormard enters it as though it were a mill."-Ed.
432
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
Thus speaks Paul-Louis Courier
And
a
writer— a real Frenchman, was one, and (what many
if
brief inimitable prose.
have denied
are asylums of the ideas and the tastes of
the last age. "By the time," I have heard a most eminent man of science observe, "by the time a man of science attains eminence on any subject, he becomes a nuisance upon it, because he is sure to retain errors which were in vogue when he was young, but which the new race have refuted." These are the sort of ideas which find their home in academies, and out of their dignified windows pooh-pooh new things. I may seem to have wandered far from early society, but I have not wandered.
ever there
would
critics
be possible) a great poet by most French characteristics—
to
reason of his
Beranger,
own
greater
in his
still
tells
us in verse:
Je croyais voir le president Faire bailler— en repondant
Que Ton vient de perdre un grand homme; Que moi je le vaux, Dieu sait comme. Mais ce president sans facon
The
Ne perore ici qu'en chanson: Toujours trop tot sa harangue est
method
is
explain
to
we do
not
by what we see. We can only comprehend why so many nations have not varied,
see
finie.
Non, non, ce n'est point r Academic;
Ce
true scientific
the past by the present— what
n'est point
comme
comme
a
when we
a TAcademie.
see
how
hateful variation
everybody turns against
it;
how
is;
how
not only
the conservatives of speculation try to root
Admis
enfin, aurai-je alors,
most machines for crushing the "monstrosities and anomalies"— the new forms, out of which, by competition and trial, the best is to be selected for the future. The point one most I am bringing out is simple: it
Pour tout esprit, I'esprit de corps? II rend le bon sens, quoi qu'on dise, Solidaire de la sottise; Mais, dans votre societe, L'esprit de corps, c'est la gaite. Get esprit la regne sans tyrannie. Non, non, ce n'est point comme a
Ce
important prerequisite of a prevailing na-
I'Academie; n'est point comme a I'Academie.^
tion
the
is
9
of
too harsh; the true one
is:
the academies
"I thought I saw the president suppress a yawn/in saying that we had just lost a great man;/As for me, God knows how much I valued him. /But this rough-and-
that
should have passed out of
it
stage of civilization into the sec-
encies of
human
nature
make
that step to
mankind.
Of course the nation we are supposing must keep the virtues of its first stage as
ready
president of ours (Desaugiers)/ Never orates here except in song, /And his speech is always too soon done. /This is certainly not the way the Academic does it,/No, it is not the way the Academic does it. / / / But, admitted finally, will I feel/Esprit de corps for every member?/It makes good sense, whatever one says,/To be solidly joined in stupidity. /But in your society, gaity/
it
passes into the after stage, else
trodden out;
it
will
have
it
lost the
will
be
savage
virtues in getting the beginning of the civilized virtues;
and the savage
virtues
tend to war are the daily bread of
which
human
nature. Carlyle said, in his graphic way,
"The ultimate question between every two
de corps— /A spirit that reigns without tyranny. /This is certainly not the way the Academic does it,/No, it is not the way the Academic does it."— Ed.
Forms the
is
first
ond stage— out of the stage where permanence is most wanted into that where variability is most wanted; and you cannot comprehend why progress is so slow till you see how hard the most obstinate tend-
commonplace, he hints, academies must ever be. But that sentence Asylums
out, but the very innovators invent
rigid
esprit
human thou
beings
kill
me?'
is,
"
'Can
History
I kill is
thee, or canst
strewn with the
wrecks of nations which have gained a
433
Great Books Library tage by a palace, and a windmill by a
piogressiveness at the cost of a great
little
they have been put to learn while yet only
But the history of Rome changes good diorama changes; while you look, you hardly see it alter; each moment is hardly different from the last moment; yet at the close the metamorphosis is complete, and scarcely anything is as it began. Just so
Such cases do not
in the history of the great prevailing city:
they confirm, the principle— that a
>ou begin with a town and you end with an empire, and this by unmarked stages. So
deal of hard manliness, and have thus pre-
fortress.
pared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a
as a
chance
for
it.
But these nations have come
out of the "pre-economic stage" too soon; apt
too
vitiate,
to
unlearn.
nation which has just gained variability
without losing legality has a singular
shrouded, so shielded, in the coarse fiber of other qualities was the delicate principle
like-
lihood to be a prevalent nation.
No
and many
ties
of progress that
nation admits of an abstract defini-
tion; all nations are
many
quali-
historical
event
beings of
sides;
no
One
exactly illustrates any one principle; every
cause a
hundred
others.
The
best history
Rembrandt;
like the art of
it
is
law
prevalent nation in the an-
In
no one can
such
was the habit of obedience, coercive and wont at first seem, a hidden impulse of extrication did manage, in some queer way, to change the substance while conforming to the accidents— to do what was wanted for the new time while seeming to do only what was directed by the old time. And the moral of their whole ing as
as use
history
is
the same: each
tion, so far as in
its
history
is
predecessors.
two ends are
many
And
nations
is
so unlike.
bility
military
advantage; alive.
it
purpose. is
As respects
this
essay,
an example of combined varia-
and
legality not investing itself in last,
but bequeathing a legacy of the combination in imperishable mental eflects. It
like
may be
objected that this principle
is
men walk when they do when they do sit. The probdo men progress? And the
saying that
walk, and sit lem is, wh\' answer suggested seems to be that they progress when they ha\e a certain suffi-
history of
Ensucceeded on a
like the stage of the
glish drama: one scene is sudden by a scene quite different— a
a
the best way, then, to keep
warlike power, and so perishing at
genera-
goes, though
The
my
to
therefore the
it
is
every sort of advantage
become
to
Judea
differs a little— and
so contiiuious as
le-
in war.
deal with such matters here, nor are they
the best times often but a very little—
from its
we know,
Roman
and
But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; frotn that have issued endless consequences. But I cannot
see that, bind-
fail to
times
early
tends
seed of adaptiveness. Even in her
itself
supremacy
permanence in the law and Levites, more distinct than any other ancient people. Nowhere in common history do we see the two forces— both so necessary and both so dangerous— so apart and so intense: Judea changed in inward thought, just as Rome changed in exterior power. Each change was continuous, gradual, and good.
world— gain her predominance by the principle on which I have dwelt? In the thick crust of her legality there was hidden little
was
it
of
cient
a
and
The Jewish nation has its type of progress in the prophets, side by side with its type
but
casts a vivid
on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen. To make a single nation illustrate a principle, you must exaggerate much and you must omit much. But, not forgetting this caution, did
Rome— the
failed,
standing instance, no doubt, shows
gality does not secure
light
not
never
that the union of progressiveness
intertwined and surrounded with
is
it
never broken.
cot-
434
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
amount
cient
of variability in their nature.
societies;
that
by occult qualities. opium sends men
has
a
tion
soporific
because
it
It
seems
to sleep
virtue,
is
whole
because
unfavorable to the principle of variability,
it
and bread feeds
not so absurd.
goes on,
it
and makes
planted by nature,
men and men and
we
next.
the
them
It
first
very
prevents
men from
it
is
men
keep
civilization;
its
for the
passing into
age of progress— the very slow and
gradually
improving
age.
Some
"standing system" of semi-free discussion as necessary to
is
break the thick crust of cus-
tom and begin progress
as
in later ages
it is
on progress when begun; probably it is even more necessary. And in the most progressive races we find it. I have spoken to carry
different
see
customary stage of
very fitness for that age unfits
It says:
different ages facsimiles of other
other ages, as
the time. But despotism
as all history shows. It tends to
out the variability im-
kills
spirit of
in the
"The beginning of civilization is marked by an intense legality; that legality is the very condition of its existence, the bond which ties it together; but that legality— that tendency to impose a settled customary yoke upon all men and all actions— if
the government answering
like saying
has an alimentary quality. But
the explanation
is
it
the primary need, and congenial to the
This seems to be the old style of explana-
already of the Jewish prophets, the
so
life
of
together, but not far varieties
enough to kill out all and destroy nature's perpetual
and the principle of all its growth. But a still more progressive racethat by which secular civilization was once created, by which it is now mainly administered—had a
tendency
to
Progress
often.
happy
is
only possible in those
where the force of
cases
that nation,
legality
has gone far enough to bind the nation
lution
is
change." The point of the so-
magnitude
to
In the very earliest glimpses of Teulife, we find the monarchic, the aristocratic, and the democratic tonic political
two known agencies.
elements already clearly marked. There are leaders with or without the royal title; there are men of noble birth, whose noble birth (in whatever the original
Ill
advantage
early
is
one of the greatest
civilization— one
of
which give a decisive turn of nations; but there are little
do
the
in
facts
nobility
to the battle
many
others.
Travelers have noticed that
may have
consisted)
them to a pre-eminence but beyond these there armed people, in whom
A
may among
perfection in political institutions
it.
better instrument of
not the invention of an imaginary
agency, but an assignment of comparative
This
still
progression. Says Mr. Freeman:
a free
is it
entitles
every way;
in
is
and
clear that
the ultimate sovereignty resides. Small matters are decided by the chiefs alone; great matters are submitted by the chiefs to the assembled nation. Such a system is far more than Teutonic; it is a common Aryan possession; it is the constitution of the Homeric Achaians on earth and of the Homeric gods on Olympus.
savage tribes those seemed to answer best
which the monarchical power was most in which the "rule of many" was in its vigor. So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism— despotism during the campaign— is indispensable. Macaulay justly said that many an army has prospered under a bad commander, but no army has ever prospered under a "debating society"; that many-headed monster is then fatal. Despotism grows in the first societies, just as democracy grows in more modern in
predominant, and those worst
Perhaps, and indeed probably, this constitution may be that of the primitive tribe which Romans left to go one way, and Greeks to go another, and Teutons to go
a third.
The
tribe took
English take the
435
it
with them, as the
common law
with them,
Great Books Library because
was the one kind
it
of polity
was somehow satisfied: what was made did as well as what was born. Nations with this sort of maxims are not likely to have unity of race in the modern sense, and as
which
they could conceive and act upon; or
it
may be tive
that the emigrants from the primiAryan stock only took with them a
good aptitude— an excellent political nature, which similar circumstances in distant countries were afterwards to develop into like forms. But anyhow it is impossible not to trace the supremacy of Teutons, Greeks, and Romans in part to their common form of government. The contests of
a physiologist understands
Which
of
sorts
it.
unions
improve
the
breed, and which are worse than both the
and the mother-race, it is not The subject was reviewed
father-race
very easy to say.
of
by M. Quatrefages in an elaborate report upon the occasion of the French Exhibition, of all things in the world. M. Quatrefages quotes from another writer the phrase that South America is a great
thought; and, in the best cases, military
laboratory of experiments in the mixture
was not impaired by freedom, though military intelligence was enhanced
of races,
the assembly cherished the
principle
of
change; the influence of the elders insured
and
sedateness
preserved
the
mold
discipline
A Roman
with the general intelligence.
army was
a free body, at
its
which
own
Carolina the Mulatto race
choice
lific,
governed by a peremptory despotism.
The mixture
of races
Much
bond
was often an ad-
cement of
of
which
to
Sir
itself after
as is
everybody
knows,
the
now most numerous, and
in various cases has been the fate of the mixed race between the white man and the native American; sometimes it prospers, sometimes it fails. And M. Quatre-
fages concludes his description thus:
En acceptant comme vraies toutes les observations qui tendent a faire admettre qu'il en sera autrement dans les localites dont j'ai parle plus haut, quelle est la conclusion a tirer de faits aussi pen semblables? Evidemment, on est oblige de reconnaitre que la developpement de la race mulatre est favorise, retarde, on empeche par des circonstances locales; en d'autres termes, qu'il depend des influences exercees par I'ensemble des conditions d'existence, par le milieu. "^^
the natural
Henry Maine de-
primitive nations contrived
do what they found convenient, as well adhere to what they fancied to be
as to
right. When they did not beget they adopted; they solemnly made believe that
new
it
In Jamaica and in Java
spreads generation after generation with-
union would have been repelled as an impiety if it could have been conceived as an idea. But by one of those .scribes so well,
not very pro-
out impediment. Equally various likewise
civil
legal fictions
America,
mixed race
it
is
so.
is
Louisiana and Florida
the third generation; but on the continent
society
that vicinity of habitation
is
in
the Mulatto cannot reproduce
as the old
was the bond of was essential to the notions of a new nation that it should have had common ancestors; the modern idea early
of
descent; no doubt
whereas
decidedly
world believed in pure blood, it had very little of it. Most historic nations conquered prehistoric nations, and though they massacred many, they did not massacre all. They enslaved the subject men, and they married the subject women. No doubt the whole vantage, too.
and reviews the different results have shown. In South
different cases
persons were descended from the old
though everybody knew that in flesh and blood they were not. They made an
stock,
artificial
10 Granting as true all the observations tending to show that it will not be any different in the localities of which I spoke above, what conclusion can be drawn from such dissimilar facts? Evidently, we
unity in default of a real unity;
and, what
it
is
not ea.sy to understand now,
the sacred sentiment requiring unity of race
436
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
By which
I
understand him to mean that
swer
to the
Jewish boast that "their race
prospers, though
scattered and
the mixture of race sometimes brings out
still
form of character better suited than either parent form to the place and time; that in such cases, by a kind of natural selection, it dominates over both parents, and perhaps supplants both, whereas in other cases the mixed race is not as good then and there as other parent forms, and then it passes away soon and of itself.
breeds in-and-in,": "You prosper because
Early in history the continual mixtures
Jews; each race was a sort of "parish race,"
a
by conquest were in
just so
many
New
in
you are so scattered; by acclimatization
new
districts,
all
that there
the
contains
it
of
variability inter-
certainly
no cosmopolitan race
like the
But the mixture of races has a singular danger as well as a singular advantage in the early world. We know now the AngloIndian suspicion or contempt for "halfcastes." The union of the Englishman and the Hindu produces something not only between races, but between moralities. They have no inherited creed or plain place in the world; they have none of the fixed traditional sentiments which are the stays of human nature. In the early world many mixtures must have wrought many ruins; they must have destroyed what they could not replace— an inbred principle of discipline and of order. But if these unions of races did not work thus— if, for example,
killed, half
of the south, of
principle
itself
narrow in thought and bounded in range, and it wanted mixing accordingly.
South
answered, sometimes it failed. But when the mixture was at its best, it must have excelled both parents in that of which so much has been said— that is, variability, and consequently progressiveness. There is more life in mixed nations. France, for instance, is justly said to be the mean term between the Latin and the German races. A Norman, as you may see by looking at him, is of the north; a Prois
of variety;
within
was
crossing
vencal
in
marriage." In the beginning of things there
races
and half
singular elements
which other nations must seek by
wandered into mixed with the old races. And the result was doubtless as various and as difficult to account for then as now; sometimes the America now.
is
various regions your nation has acquired
experiments
mixing races as are going on
it
is
most southern. You have in France Latin, Celtic, German, compounded in an infinite number of proportions: one as she is in
the two races were so near akin that their
feeling, she
potent organization so presided over the
is
morals united as well as their breeds,
one race by
various not only in the past
history of her various
provinces,
but
the variety
French races contributes to the play of the polity; it gives a chance for fitting new things which otherwise there would not be. And early races must have wanted mixing of
more than modern
races. It
is
if
numbers and pre-
it up and assimilate it, and leave no separate remains of it— then the admixture was invaluable. It added to the probability of variabilit>', and therefore of improvement; and if that improvement even in part took the military line, it might give the mixed and ameliorated state a steady advantage in the battle of nations, and a greater chance of lasting
temperaments. Like the Irish element and the Scottish element in the
Commons,
great
other as to take
in
their present
English House of
its
said, in an-
in the world.
Another mode
must recognize that the development of the mulatto race
in
which one
state
ac-
quires a superiority over competing states
favored, hindered, or stopped by local circumstances; in other words, that it depends on the influences exerted by the conditions of existence, that is, by the environment. is
by provisional institutions, if I may so them. The most important of these— slaverv— arises out of the same earlv conis
call
437
Great Books Library quest as the mixture of races.
an
an
unassimilated,
something which but yet
name
has a bad
We
justly.
with laws which keep
men
slavery
ignorant, with
of
the
There
early ages.
which,
institutions
stage of growth,
at
nations in
all
choose and cleave
to.
is
favor;
its
all
a
is
one
certain
countries
"Slavery," says Aris-
by the law of nature," meanwas everywhere to be found—
totle, "exists
ing that
it
was a rudimentary universal point of "There are very
many
bor; the laborers go
There
is
The
sort of originality
bidding of nations; they do'
any future. But originality in war does, and slave-owning nations, having time to think, are likely to be more shrewd in policy, and more crafty in strategy. No doubt this momentary gain is bought or
at a ruinous after-cost.
use;
cannot hire
it
and work
for
of leisure
become
slavery
past.
is
grow
even
When
other sources
possible, the
But
all its evils
worse.
"Retail"
one use of
remain, and
slavery— the
which a master owns a few whom he well knows and daily sees
slavery in slaves,
—is not at of
all
an intolerable
state; the slaves
Abraham had no doubt
a fair
as
life,
went in that day. But wholesale slavery, where men are but one of the investments of large capital, and where a great owner, so far from knowing each
things
countries (for pastoral countries are very
selves.
may
English colonies,"
has land; capital, at least in agricultural
little
and
not tend to secure themselves a long future
would keep slaves at once if them"; and he was speaking not only of old colonies trained in slavery, and raised upon the products of it, but likewise of new colonies started by freemen, and which ought, one would think, to wish to contain freemen only. But Wakefield knew what he was saying; he was a careful observer of rough societies, and he had watched the minds of men in them. He had seen that leisure is the great need of early societies, and slaves only can give men leisure. All freemen in new countries must be pretty equal; every one has labor, and every one
of
born to work that others
think.
in the early
"who we would let
is
possible;
is
possible. It creates a
polity.
said E. G. Wakefield, as late as 1848,
different),
leisure it
which slavery gives is of the first practical advantage in early communities; and the repose it gives is a great artistic advantage when they come to be described in history. The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could not have had the steady calm which marks them, if they had themselves been teased and hurried about their flocks and herds. Refinement of feeling and repose of appearance have indeed no market value
won-
a
it
may
others
us forget, the great services that slavery in
makes
not work, and not to think in order that
But the evils which we have endured from slavery in recent ages must not blind us to, or make rendered
first
set of persons
in chains,
laws that hinder families.
derful presumption in
when
only possible
world, and very
with gangs
it
In such countries there can be few gentlemen and no ladies. Refinement is
is
atom:
Slavery, too,
it.
in the later
connect
slave
the body poHtic,
in
is
hardly part of
is
A
undigested
slave,
can hardly
them he works,
la-
them-
This
name
a story often told of a great
who went out to Austrawith a shipload of laborers and a car-
is
tell is
how many gangs
an abominable
the slavery which has
made
revolting to the best minds,
of
state.
the
and has
English capitalist
nearly rooted the thing out of the best of
lia
the world.
riage; his plan
was
keep
his carriage, just as in
(so the story goes)
There
that the laborers should
build a house for him, and that he
he had
would
this.
no out-of-the-way marvel
is
The whole
history of civilization
in is
strewn with creeds and institutions which
England. But tr\'
to live in
were invaluable
his carriage, for his laborers left
him, and
wards. Progress would not have been the
went awav
to
work
to
for themselves.
rarit\
it
is
if
at first,
and deadly
after-
the early food had not been
438
J
Bagehot: Physics and Politics the late poison.
A
full
examination of these
provisional institutions
would need
In spite of his great genius, after a long
half a
life of writing it is a question still whether even a single work of his can take a lasting place in high literature. There is a want
volume, and would be out of place and useless here. Venerable oligarchy, august
monarchy, are two that would alone need large chapters. But the sole point here necessary is to say that such preliminary forms and feelings at first often bring many graces and many refinements, and often
suspicion on their substance (though
two
which some step
a is
which he has himself which plain people will always detect and deride. But whatever may be the fate of his fame, Mr. Carlyle fallacies,
of
a high notion, but
military virtue. in
it
often profound); and he brandishes one or
tend to secure them by the preservative
There are cases
manner which throws
of sanity in their
in
has taught the present generation
many
and one of these
"God-
I
an early society
intellectual progress gives
lessons,
that
is
I
some gain
in
war; more obvious cases are
when some kind some such
of moral quality
War
gain.
fearing" armies are the best armies. Before his
gives
both needs and gen-
people
"Trust
in
laughed at Cromwell's God, and keep your
powder dry." But we now know that the trust was of as much use as the powder,
erates certain virtues— not the highest, but
what may be
time
saying,
called the preliminary, vir-
not of more. That high concentration of
tues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedi-
if
Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated,
steady feeling makes
ence, the habit of discipline.
them
will give
race
been the
never prospered at Rome, but Stoicism did;
of these efficacious virtues
the
of
ancient
any
as
world— perhaps
as
much as any race in the modem world too. And the success of the nations which possess
these
great
martial virtues
means by which
has
their
dare everything
continuance
and
a military advantage,
make them more likely to stay in the race of nations. The Romans probably had as
much
men
and do anything. This subject would run to an infinite extent if anyone were competent to handle it. Those kinds of morals and that kind of religion which tend to make the firmest and most effectual character are sure to prevail, all else being the same; and creeds or systems that conduce to a soft limp mind tend to perish, except some hard extrinsic force keep them alive. Thus Epicureanism
has been secured in the world, and the
the
destruction of the opposite vices insured
prevailing nation
Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
seemed a confirming creed, and deterred by what looked like a relaxing creed. The inspiriting doctrines fell upon the ardent character, and so confirmed its energy. Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger. Such is no doubt one cause why Monotheism tends to prevail
also.
In
the
last
sounded strange
century
it
would
have
am
going
to speak, as I
advantage of reSuch an idea would have been opposed to ruling prejudices, and would hardly have escaped philosophical ridicule. But the notion is but a commonplace in our to speak, of the military ligion.
day, for a
man
of genius has
made
it
over
altogether are full of faults
young and deter
all
produces
it
character,
by a great
by miscellaneous ligion
in
great
by what
attracted
higher,
a
calmed and concensingle object;
confused by competing
his
own. Mr. Carlyle's books are deformed by phrases like "infinities" and "verities," and the very
was
Polytheism;
steadier trated
character of the
serious
stiff,
rites,
deities.
it
Pohtheism
commission, and
it
is
not
or distracted
is
is
weak
re-
ac-
attract
cordingly.
But
that are older.
who were
monotheist, were conquered by
which
439
it
will
be said the Jews,
Great Books Library the Romans, who were polytheist. Yes, it must be answered, because the Romans had other gifts; they had a capacity for pohtics, a habit of discipHne, and of these the Jews had not the least. The rehgious advantage was an advantage, but it was
history
reveals
it,
doubtless due to
is
Bred
in
war, and nursed
in
war,
it
could
not revolt from the things of war, and one of the principal of these
is
human
pain.
Since war has ceased to be the moving
counterweighed.
No one
first
the warlike origin of the old civilization.
force in the world,
men have become more
the
tender one to another, and shrink from
prominence given to war. We are dealing with early ages; nation-ma/cmg is the occupation of man in these ages, and it is war that makes nations. Nation-changing comes afterwards, and is mostly effected by peaceful revolution, though even then
what they used to inflict without caring; and this not so much because men are im-
be
should
war, too, plays
its
surprised
is
proved (which
a
may
or
may
not
be
in
various cases), but because they have no
longer the daily habit of war; have no longer formed their notions upon war, and
The idea of an modern idea; in
part.
indestructible nation
at
therefore are guided ings
which
by thoughts and feelsuch— soldiers edu-
soldiers as
ages all nations were destructible, and the further we go back, the more incessant was the work of destruction. The
cated simply by their trade— are too hard
internal decoration of nations
cal
early
to understand.
when
Very like this is the contempt for physiweakness and for women which marks early society too. The non-combatant pop-
have have here
ulation is sure to fare ill during the ages of combat. But these defects, too, are cured or
been concerned with the political scaffolding; it will be the task of other papers to trace the process of political finishing and
means of winning their way in the world; and mind without muscle has far greater
a sort of
is
secondary process, which succeeds the
main
forces that create nations
principally
The
building.
may
done
their work.
We
lessened;
some
which the causes must be and I now mention them only to bring out how many softer growths have now half-hidden the old and harsh civilization which war made. But it is very dubious whether the spirit of war does not still color our morality far too much. Metaphors from law and metaphors from war make most of our current moral phrases, and a nice examination would easily explain that both rather vitiate what both often illustrate. The military habit makes man think far too much of definite action, and far too little of brooding meditation. Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces scrutinized,
suggest. It belongs to the idea of progress
who
provement
seem
attractive
live far on; the price of
is
that
the
unimproved
imwill
always look degraded. But how far are the strongest nations really the best nations?
lence in I
war
How
far
is
excel-
a criterion of other excellence?
cannot answer
this
now
fully,
but three
or four considerations are very plain.
War,
have said, nourishes the "preliminary" virtues, and this is almost as much as to as
I
say that there are virtues which nourish. All
it
does not
which may be called "grace"
as well as virtue
it does not nourish; humanity, charity, a nice sense of the rights
of others,
it
sensibility to
in
human
suffering,
world as
it
which stood
is
it
are not overt resolutions, but latent
and half-involuntary promptings. The mis-
certainly does not foster. In-
striking a fact in the
of the after-changes in the interior
of nations, of
than the fierce fights of early ages can ever
to those
marvelous
force than muscle without mind. These are
nicer play of finer forces
then require more pleasing thoughts
that beginnings can never
women have now
take of military ethics
so
when
is
to exaggerate the
conception of discipline, and so to present
440
Bagehot: Physics and Politics and therefore they succeeded. Just so in most cases, all through the earliest times,
the moral force of the will in a barer form
than
ever ought to take. Military morals
it
can direct the ax to cut down the tree, but nothing of the quiet force by it knows
martial merit
which the
win.
What to
forest grows.
has been said
enough,
is
many
bring out that there are
hope,
I
is
is
The simple make a man a
virtues of such ages mostly
the nation that ought to
soldier
make him
they
if
No doubt the number may be too potent
brute
force
even then
of
(as so
it is afterwards): civilization may be thrown back by the conquest of many very rude men over a few less rude men. But the
often
elements of civilization are great mili-
first
mode
the particular
a token of real merit: the
anything.
qualities
and many institutions of the most various sort which give nations an advantage in military competition; that most of these and most warlike qualities tend principally to good; that the constant winning of these favored competitors
is
nation that wins
tary advantages, and, roughly,
by which the best qualities wanted in elementary civilization are propagated and
of the
a rule
is
it
times that you can infer merit
first
from conquest, and that progress is promoted by the competitive examination of
preserved.
constant war.
why
the
"protected" regions of the world— the
in-
This principle explains at once
NATION-MAKING
3.
of continents
terior
In
the last essay
endeavored
I
that in the early age of
ing age" able,
I
called it— there
though not
The
progress.
worst;
certain,
show
to
man— the
islands
in the
being a
No.
of one advantage
overcame
I;
still,
and
explains
was continual fighting there was a likelihood of improvement in martial virtues, and in early times many virtues are really
in
which
is,
tend to success in
in later times
calling,
we do
them by the present
not by their
first.
The
virtue
effects,
which
no
one
now would
is
nations,
and the disciplined nations won.
The
gift of
gift of is
old—
the
their success to
nations
it.
they had
deference to usage which combines
nations,
lected
II,
being a
better
little
II.
And
why Western Europe was
it
early
was exceedingly
Unlike
wanted
it,
who
did not possess
and those who had
it,
not
quite as marked distinctions as we see them now? What breaks the human race up into fragments so unlike one another, and yet each in its interior so monotonous? The question is most puzzling, though the fact is so familiar, and I would not venture
not nowadays a warlike virtue; yet the
Romans owed much of Alone among ancient
No.
keep it. The conflict of nations is at first main force in the improvement of nations. But what are nations? W^hat are these groups which are so familiar to us, and yet, if we stop to think, so strange; which are as old as history; which Herodotus found in almost as great numbers and with
disciplined
institutions to
as
a
"conservative innovation"— the
matching new
class,
routed and effaced
being enervated, could struggle hard to
call
yet in early times
it
it
a
martial,
Ill,
corrupting part; those
judge of
love of law, for example,
still
most regions, it was a tempting part of the world, and yet not a
is
We
are
advance of other countries, because
severe.
war—
hid by their later usefulness.
No.
by
there the contest of races
not think of so
because the original usefulness
as
class
better,
little
routed and effaced No.
the inferior competitor. So long as there
"martial"— that
Zealand-
They
preparatory school; they have not
been taken on
tendency towards
best nations conquered the
by the possession
New
Australia or
like
outlying
Africa,
are of necessity backward.
"fight-
was a consider-
or another the best competitor
like
and the partial permission of sechange which improves nations;
441
Great Books Library say that
to
can answer
I
it
completely,
the
sum
total of physical conditions varied
man from man, and changed
can advance some considerations which, as it seems to me, go a certain way towards answering it. Perhaps these same
though
I
race to race.
considerations throw
But experience refutes this. The English immigrant lives in the same climate as the Australian or Tasmanian, but he has not
the further and
become
some light, too, on more interesting question why some few nations progress, and why the greater part do not. Of course at first all such distinctions of nation and nation were explained by still
original
diversity of race.
similar,
it
was
said,
They
in
single
may
You
scended.
argue,
rightly
Aryan nations are
all
or peculiar
origin,
long believed that
all
just
as
cas
Greek-speaking na-
were of one such stock. But you will not be listened to if you say that there were one Adam and Eve for Sparta, and another Adam and Eve for Athens. All Greeks are evidently of one origin, but within the limits of the Greek family, as of all other families, there is some contrastmaking force which causes city to be unlike city, and tribe unlike tribe.
animals
species)
no doubt
do not speak now
arise in nature.
trast,
show
oppose their race. But you could
that the natural obstacles oppos-
human
Sparta
mate, or rather of land, sea, and
air,
countries
are
due
to
corre-
sponding physical differences or similarities in the countries themselves— meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction. Borneo and New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be, are zoologically as wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts and its temperate climate, yet produces birds and (juadrupeds which are closely
Natural
natural idea) that the direct effect of
when we compare their animal Nowhere does the ancient
different
of
life much differed between and Athens, or indeed between Rome and Athens; and yet Spartans, Athenians, and Romans differ essentially. Old writers fancied (and it was a very
ing
The Moluc-
doctrine— that differences or similarities in the various forms of life that inhabit
means the preservation of those individuals which struggle best with the not
surface.
productions.
selection
forces that
its
are the counterpart of the Philip-
climate, and bathed by the same oceans, there exists the greatest possible con-
selection, as wild vari-
(I
.
Yet between these corresponding groups of islands, constructed, as it were, after the same pattern, subjected to the same
Certainly, too, nations did not originate
by simple natural
phys-
Borneo, he
pines in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility, their luxuriant forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with the east end of Java, has a climate almost as arid as that of Timor.
was
tions
eties of
.
tion that clothes
or of a
it
overrated.
closely resembles New Guinea, not only in its vast size and freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, its uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegeta-
half-dozen or more great
families of men may or may not have been descended from separate first stocks, but sub-varieties have certainly not so de-
wrongly, that
is
says, .
Some
conditions
ical
(consistently with plain facts) imagine enough original races to make it
Even
animals his researches show, as by an ob-
ject lesson, that the direct efficacy of
work. You
cannot
tenable.
in
regions, with every sort of diversity.
are dis-
created dissimilar. But in most cases this its
nor will a thou-
most respects, make him like them. The Papuan and the Malay, as Mr. Wallace finds, live now, and have lived for ages, side by side in the same tropical
because they were
easy supposition will not do
like those races;
sand years,
related
to
those
damp, luxuriant where clothe the
cli-
and
of
442
New
Guinea.
inhabiting
the
hot,
which everyplains and mountains
forests
Bagehot: Physics and Politics That is, we have hke Hving things in the most dissimilar situations, and unhke Hving things in the most similar ones. And though some of Mr. Wallace's speculations on ethnology may be doubtful, no one doubts that in the archipelago he has
tinct race), or of St. James's Street as
when Mr. Fox and
not of the places
very distant and unlike
we
men in men in
find like
places,
and
places.
Climate
unlike is
clearly
Or
localities.
contrasted
resembling
the alterations in physical condition,
not the force
which makes nations, for it does not always make them, and they are often made with-
few
(if
ing
human
out
possessed, but the earlier did not!
it.
The problem is,
of
hard
"nation-making"— that
we now
historical
see them, and such as in
times they have always
cannot, as
it
is
been—
which the
later
period
How
say what has caused the
to
is
it
life
in the people!
And
the contrast, at least at
yet
how
first
total
sight!
In
from Bacon to Addison, from Shakespeare to Pope, we seem to pass into
passing
seems to me, be solved with-
it into two: one, the making marked races, such as the Negro, or the red man, or the European; and the second, that of making the minor
a
out separating of
how
any) the scientific inventions affect-
change
the explanation of the origin of nations
such as
let
anyone think how little is the external change in England between the age of Elizabeth and the age of Anne compared with the national change. How few were
though rarely with such marked
emphasis,
we seem to be reading we know so well, but of
of an heir apparent,
studied so well, as often elsewhere in the
world,
make
out of the dissipation
capital"
"political
was
it
his party tried to
broadly
new
world.
In the
mode
first
of these essays
which the
in
pens, and
I
recur to
I
literary
spoke of the
change hap-
because, literature
it
such as the distinction between Spartan and Athenian, or between
being narrower and more definite than
Scotchman and Englishman. Nations, as we see them, are (if my arguments prove true) the produce of two great forces: one the race-making force which, whatever it was, acted in antiquity, and has now wholly, or almost, given over acting; and
and
distinctions,
life,
as it
it
which
is
acting
now
ever acted, and creating as
as much much as
generation after genera-
exceedingly curious, and the change
when it is very hard Something seems to steal over society, say of the Regency time as compared with that of the present Queen. If we read of life at Windsor (at the cottage now pulled down), or of Bond Street as it was in the days of the Loungers (an exaccount
writer,
as
change
model in
the
was explained,
one, hit on something
suited the public taste: he
occasionally happens to
the
which went on writing, and others imitated him, and they so accustomed their readers to that style that they would bear nothing else. Those readers who did not like it were driven to the works of other ages and other countrieshad to despise the "trash of the day," as they would call it. The age of Anne patronized Steele, the beginner of the essay, and Addison its perfecter, and it neglected writings in a wholly discordant key. I have heard that the founder of the Times was asked how all the articles in the Times came to seem to be written by one man, and that he replied: "Oh, there is always some one best contributor, and all the rest
remembered
The strongest light on the great causes which have formed and are forming nations is thrown by the smaller causes which are altering nations. The way in which tion, is
Some
of
not necessarily a very excellent writer or a
ever created.
nations change,
in the less serves as a
illustration
greater.
the other the nation-making force, properly so called,
change
a
for.
copy."
And
this
is
doubtless the true ac-
count of the manner in which a certain trade
443
mark,
a
curious
and
indefinable
Great Books Library unity,
main causes
on every newspaper. Per-
settles
would be possible to name the men who a few years since created the Saturday Review style, now imitated by another and a younger race. But when the style of a
national
once formed, the continuance of it is preserved by a much more despotic impulse than the tendency to imitation— by
girls
haps
it
periodical
who
trustee,
The
may
if I
say
sort.
He
whom
have read
sermon, "Personal Influence the Means of
Propagating the Truth";
recommend
the editor does in the case
do
rest.
Of course there was always some reason (if we only could find it) which gave the prominence in each age to some particular winning literature. There always is some
why
we know
the fashion of female dress
is
But
just as in the case of dress
that
nowadays the determining
it is.
very
much
all
of an accident, so in
the case of literary fashion the origin
demimonde
liners of Paris, or the
enjoin our English ladies,
good deal chance; but creed, those
does not at
whom all
is
may
seen.
so
I
it
The
is
am
we wore
go)
a
is
will
and
out
it it
much
who
always begins on some decent reason, but, once started, it is propagated as a fashion
politics,
read
it
because
because nothing else
is
The same patronage
it
is
easily to
express
it
little.
the
in
Those who
much; those who it
excessively;
dissent are silent, or unheard.
After such great matters as religion and
who do
there,
political
sentiment a
it
excessively express
those
it
catching,
of us not so earnest in
corresponding
a
feel
not like
in
quickly a leading statesman
country: most feel
feel
propagated; even those
is
The change what everyone feels, though no one can define it. Each predominant mind calls
spreads,
is
which again,
is
from saying with equal
dress
how
we were most
stone;
year" (as
fashion
And
the time of Lord Palmerston.
soon nowhere to be
literary
far
de-
whom
primitive unreasonableness: a literary taste
in
strongly
can change the tone of the community! We are most of us earnest with Mr. Glad-
imitative pro-
last
of teachers
life
matters,
of Paris,
and those
the
not their tenets.
a
suppose) a
soon as
as
it.
(I
once insures uniformity;
the phrase Just
is
suits
it
wear
"that horrid thing
though
I
They
can but teach the commonplace that
I
it is
good deal of an accident. What the mil-
pensity
so.
and what he says, put shortly and simply, and taken out of his delicate language, is but this: that men are guided by type, not by argument; that some winning instance must be set up before them, or the sermon will be vain, and the doctrine will not spread. I do not want to illustrate this matter from religious history, for I should be led far from my purpose, and after
in the case
They patronize
general.
in
one thing and reject the
it
not,
leader of men, of one who has led very many where they little thought of going, as to the mode in which they are to be led;
What
is
if
they do
that
selects the suitable, the confoiTn-
literature
cause
if
there see the opinion of a great practical
of a periodical, the readers
what
the special words
gestures of each family
editor sees that they get that
forming.
reason
little
may have been visiting. I do many of my readers happen to Father Newman's celebrated
they
know
not
acts as
ing articles, and he rejects the non-con-
of
come home speaking
and acting the
want to read what they have been used to read— the same sort of thought, the same sort of
The
attractive
catch the gait of their masters, or as mobile
regular buxers of a periodical
words.
which change
Some one
nation, or a part of the nation, as servants
the subscribers.
so, for
believe,
I
type catches the eye, so to speak, of the
is
the self-interest of the editor,
too,
character.
it
may seem
the subject from
and
be found.
trifling
little
trifling.
The bane
posity:
people
to illustrate
bo\s. But
of philosophy
will
not
see
it
is
that
is
not
pomsmall
things are the miniatures of greater, and
of favored forms,
and persecution of disliked forms, are the
it
444
seems
a
loss
of
abstract
dignity
to
Bagehot: Physics and Politics freshen their minds by object lessons from
would account
know. But every boarding school changes as a nation changes. Most of us may remember thinking, "How odd it is that this 'half should be so unlike last
cherie in
what
they
for
being, since
its
but extravagant cases
is
gau-
not an
offense against religion or morals, but
is
simply bad imitation.
We
now we never go out of bounds, last half we were always going: now we play rounders, then we played prisoner's base"; 'half:
is
must not think
voluntary,
contrary,
it
that this imitation
or even
has
its
conscious.
mainly
seat
On in
the
very
obscure parts of the mind, whose notions,
and so through all the easy life of that time. In fact, some ruling spirits, some one or two ascendant boys, had left, one or two others had come; and so all was changed. The models were changed, and the copies changed; a different thing was praised, and a different thing bullied. A curious case of the same tendency was noticed to me only lately. A friend of mine —a Liberal Conservative— addressed a meeting of working men at Leeds, and was
so far
much
European resident in the East, even the shrewd merchant and "the post-captain," with his bright, wakeful eyes of commerce, comes soon to believe in witchcraft, and to assure you, in confidence, that there "really is something in it." He has
from having been consciously profelt to exist; so far from being conceived beforehand, are not even duced, are hardly felt at
changed.
The
among
truth
is
what
But
him
belief,
us
believe
to
that,
and this,
are
the obscurest parts of our nature.
nature of credulity
as to the imitative
a capital description of
how
is
every sort of
never seen anything convincing himself, but he has seen those who have seen those
tailor
current infatuations of his sect or party.
who have fact,
For a short time— say some fortnight— he is he argues and objects; but, day by day, the poison thrives, and reason wanes. What he hears from his friends, what he reads in the party organ, produces its
resolute;
man
effect.
The
plain,
palpable
conclusion
which everyone around him believes, has an influence yet greater and more subtle; that conclusion seems so solid and unmistakable; his own good arguments get daily more and more like a dream. Soon
one of the strongest parts of his natiue. And one sign of it is the great pain which we feel when our imitation has been unsuccessful. There is a cynical doctrine that most men would rather be accused of wickedness than of gaucherie. And this is but another way of saying that the bad copying of predominant manners is felt to be more of a disgrace than common consideration before
our
more mod-
that the propensity of is
seat of the imi-
there can be no doubt. In Eothen there
shoemaker started the moderate cheer; and the great bulk followed suit. Only a few in each case were silent, and an absolute contrast was in ten minutes presented by the same elements.
The
disinclining
or
erate
to imitate
is
seen those who have seen. In he has lived in an atmosphere of infectious belief, and he has inhaled it. Scarcely anyone can help yielding to the
radical
started the radical cheer; the
The main
the causes predisposing us to believe
pleased at finding his characteristic,
ringleaders
the time.
tative part of our nature
and perhaps refined, points both apprehended and applauded. "But then," as he narrated, "up rose a blatant Radical who said the very opposite things, and the working men cheered him too, and quite equally." He was puzzled to account for so rapid a change. But the mass of the meeting was no doubt nearly neutral, and, if set going, quite ready to applaud any good words without much thinking. The
is
the gravest sage shares the folly of the
party with which he acts, and the sect with
which he worships. In true metaphysics trary
445
,
all
to
common
I
believe that, con-
opinion,
unbelief
far
Great Books Library and requires an
oftener needs a reason effort
than
Naturally, and
belief.
if
also happened looking a little bad, on which the dismal, anxious people began, and all the rest followed their words. And in both cases an avowed dissentient is set down as "crotchety." "If you want," said
man
were made according to the pattern of the logicians, he would say, "When I see a valid argument I will believe, and till I see such argument I will not believe."
Swift, "to gain the reputation of a sensible
man, you should be
But, in fact, every idea vividly before us
we
soon appears to us to be true, unless
keep up our perceptions of the arguments which prove it untrue, and voluntarily coerce our minds to remember its false-
tellectual persecution
no maxim can be more unsound, none can be more exactly conformable to ordinary
The
is
strong,
permanent, but which
mere presentation careful about
some unusual lieve it; and
not be attended
it,
is
too.
of an idea, unless
or unless there
resistance, this
is
why
is
are
within
makes us bethe
belief
their
part— their
tellectual
The
we
to.
the infection of imitation
most inward and increed. But it also invades men by the most bodily part of the mind, so to speak, the link between soul and body— the manner. No one needs to have this explained; we all know how catches
its
and
bright,
false
way men in
In this
ac-
has no distinct conception
it
idea which
of an
resolutely
which passes through
cepts every idea
brain as true;
child
being you
much quiet inamong "reasonable" is
men; a cautious person hesitates before he tells them anything new, for if he gets a name for such things he will be called "flighty," and in times of decision he will
ages a philosophical maxim, and though
nature.
of the opinion of the
for the time
There
are conversing."
hood. "All clear ideas are true" was for
human
whom
person with
makes us imitate manner of those
a kind of subtle influence
of
or
no seem so very clear as those inculcated on us from every side. The grave part of mankind are quite as
try
the
to
imitate
us.
To conform
others adds to our belief so quickly, for
around
ideas
Rome— whatever the fashion ma\' whatever Rome we may for the
liable
to
these
frivolous part.
imitated
The
beliefs
belief of the
as
to the fashion of
be,
and
time be
at— is among the most obvious needs of human nature. But what is not so obvious,
the
money-
though
as certain,
is
that the influence of
mainly composed of grave
the imitation goes deep as well as extends
as imitative as any belief. You one day everyone enterprising, enthusiastic, vigorous, eager to buy, and eager to order: in a week or so you will find almost the whole society depressed, anxious, and wanting to sell. If you examine the reasons for the activity, or for
wide. "The matter," as Wordsworth says,
style,
from
the inactivity, or for the change, you will
that
the
hardly be able to trace them at
more
market, which people, will
is
is
"of
find
all,
If
you
much comes will
endeavor
out of the to write an
imitation of the thoughts of Swift in a cop>' of the style of Addison, \'ou will find not
only that
and,
is
it
its
hard
to
write
Addison's
intrinsic excellence,
more you approach
>'ou lose the
but also
to
it
the
thought of Swift. The
eager passion of the meaning beats upon
you can trace them, they are of In fact, these opinions were formed not by reason, but by mimicry. Something happened that looked a little good, on which eager sanguine men talked loudly, and common people caught their tone. A little while afterwards, and when people were tired of talking this, something as far as
little
very
style
manner."
the mild drapery of the words.
force.
So you
could not express the plain thoughts of an
Englishman
in
the
grand manner of a
Spaniard. Insensibly, and as by a sort of
magic, the kind of manner which a
man
catches eats into him, and makes him in the end what at
446
first
he only seems.
Bagehot: Physics and Politics the principal mode in which the minds of an age produce their effect. They set the tone which others take, and the fashion which others use. There is an odd idea that those who take what is called a "scientific view" of history need rate lightly the influence of individual character. It would be as reasonable to say that those who take a scientific view of nature need think little of the influence of the sun. On the scientific view a great man
This
fundamental disposition, agreeing
is
greatest
is
new
a great
compounded
cause,
out of other causes (for
elsewhere
I
their favorite
to others
I
want
to bring
of one type; they and (though other causes have intervened and disturbed it)
men
in society as
try
to
we now
show
that
knowledged causes, such
see
it.
the necessary operation of the principles of
as
New
England character— in no respect unby its first character. This case is well known, but it is not so that the same process, in a weaker shape, is going on in America now. Congeniality of sentiment is a reason of selection, and a bond of cohesion in the "West" at present. Complete observers say that townships grow up there by each place taking its own religion, its own manners, and its own ways. Those who have these morals and that religion go to that place, and stay there; and those who have not these morals and that religion either settle elsewhere at
of to
I
ac-
change of
so
work one
call it— the
by
not
in
creed
all
is
process of
similar faith over similar
and very cases where
operate,
of coloniza-
like
less visible
is
likely to continue.
in vigor,
And
and the object of avoidance, and But first I must speak
their effect.
may
by sudden "swarms" of
still
this principle
new
settlements,
does
being
formed of "emigrants," are sure to be composed of rather restless people, mainly. The stay-at-home people are not to be
of the origin of nations: of nation-making, as
or soon pass on.
tion
attraction
they change the object of
The days
first,
almost over, but a
progress of science, act principally through imitation
original
affected
climate, alteration of political institutions,
this cause; that
many
unaltered, and has left an entire
traits still
in
Soon
more
the
it;
inheritance has transmitted
myself— that this unconscious imitation and encouragement of appreciated character, and this equally unconscious shrinking from and persecution of disliked character, is the main force which molds and fashions shall
up
began
sedulously imitated
home
what every new observation more and more freshly
dis-
set
government; they discourage
original settlers
ques-
society brings
own
creed,
forbid other forms or habits of government. Of course a nation .so made will have a separate stamp and mark. The
or not
know, very long and tedious
I
setting out this; but
re-
liefs,
or degradation.
am,
own
their
in
form a separate
other dispositions, persecute other be-
all
anyhow, new in all its effects, and all its results. Great models for good and evil sometimes appear among men, who follow them either to improveI
teach
position,
tion of free will), but,
ment
in politics,
settlement; they exaggerate their
do not here, or
in these papers, raise the
agreeing
ligion,
proper subject of
this paper.
found there, and these are the quiet, easy
The
one of
people.
which we have obvious examples in the most recent times, and which is going on now. The most simple example is the
formed
process of nation-making
foundation of the
New
first
is
A
great
agreeing
it
ordinary proportion
State of America,
of persons
settlement
expelled by terror,
much
England,
number
new
sure to have in
which has such a marked and such a deep national character. say
A
voluntarily
when people were I am not speaking) is much more than the
(for of old times,
less
of
active
men, and
than the ordinary proportion of
inactive; and this accounts for a large part, though not perhaps all, of the difference
in
447
Great Books Library between the English English
The causes which formed in
New
much upon mankind
fancy.
Society
"voluntary
voluntary.
is
their
in
ian,
system"
A man
in
but
himself from
ment. Society then
upon an
born
other
and cannot
extri-
They
made
them
philosophers, of
ruder ages the religion of savages
a thing too feeble to create a schism or
found a community.
We
are
speak of great ideas, not with pre-historic or the present savages. But though under very different forms, the same essential causes— the imitation of preferred characters and the elimination of detested characters— were at work in the oldest times, and are at work among rude men now. Strong as the propensity to imitation is among civilized men, we must conceive it as an impulse of which their minds have been partially denuded. Like
the
times,
power.
and
is
It
was strongest
strongest
in
it
is
savage tribe resembles a herd
where the leader goes
it
language,
housemaid pher.
He
the chances
will catch
it
are
own
the
thoughts. But unless she
can imitate the utterances she has no
that
before the philoso-
has something else to do; he can
live in his
life till
of the kitchen.
is
lost;
she
she can join in the chatter
The propensity
to
mimicry,
and the power of mimicry, are mostly strongest in those who have least abstract minds. The most wonderful examples of imitation in the world are perhaps the imitations of civilized men by savages in the use of martial weapons. They learn
the farseeing sight, the infallible hearing,
half-lost
A
movements before it are its ver>lives by what it sees and hears. Uneducated people in civilized nations have vestiges of the same condition. If you send a housemaid and a philosopher to a foreign country of which neither knows life;
flint-men
the magical scent of the savage,
too.
much
clings to
ternal
dealing
when we
with people capable of history
same monotonous nature
and thus soon become that which he alis. For not only the tendency, but also the power, to imitate is stronger in savages than civilized men. Savages copy more quickly, and they copy better. Children, in the same way, are born mimics; they cannot help imitating what comes before them. There is nothing in their minds to resist the propensity to copy. Every educated man has a large inward supply of ideas to which he can retire, and in which he can escape from or alleviate unpleasant outward objects. But a savage or a child has no resource. The ex-
on religious grounds of isolated Romans to sail beyond the sea would have seemed to the ancient Romans an impossibility.
to
civilized.
capacity-
ready
it unless it was true. But Lord Melbourne was only uttering out of season, and in a modem time, one of the most firm and accepted maxims of old times. A secession
still
more
mental
they go too; they copy blindly his habits,
anything was no reason for his believing
is
are
greater
of gregarious beasts;
course, said that a man's fathers' believing
In
have
of the
but of families; creeds then descend by inheritance in those families. Lord Melbourne once incurred the ridicule of philosophers by saying he should adhere to the English Church because it was the
The
they
respects
larger stores of inward thought. But
up, not of in-
dividuals,
religion of his fathers.
Zealanders, are less uniform;
structure of civilized nations, because in
in-
is
early ages
Tasmanians. The higher savages,
New
they have more of the varied and compact
an inherited governis
all
as the
in-
not then formed upon
to a certain obedience,
cate
England
cannot be conceived as
recent times
acting
a
which every observer notices in savage nations. When you have seen one Fuegian, you have seen all Fuegians— one Tasman-
England, and the
in
in Australia.
a
in ancient
uncivilized
regions.
This extreme propensity to imitation is one great reason of the amazing sameness
the knack, as sportsmen call
448
it,
with
in-
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
A
conceivable rapidity.
some one had mutilated
North American
Indian— an Australian even— can shoot as well as any white man. Here the motive is at
maximum,
its
well
as
the
as
image,
god's
a
and so offended him. Almost every detail of life in the classical times— the times when real history opens— was invested with
innate
power. Every savage cares more for the
a religious sanction; a sacred ritual regu-
power
whether it was called of it was older than the word "law"; it was part of an ancient usage conceived as emanating from a superhuman authority, and not to be transgressed without risk of punishment by more than mortal power. There was such a solidarite then between citizens that each might be led to persecute the other for
any other power. The persecuting tendency of all savages, and, indeed, of all ignorant people, is even
more
No
of killing than for
striking than their imitative tendency.
deviate from the old barbarous customs and usages of their tribe. Very commonly all the tribe would expect a nation
punishment from the gods if any one of them refrained from what was old, or began what was new. In modern times and in cultivated countries we regard each actions,
responsible
as
and do not
that the misconduct of others
can bring
guilt
on them. Guilt
to us
cleaving to the chooser. But in early ages
member of the make all the tribe
offend
peculiar god, to expose
the act of one
its
tribe to penalties
tribe
con-
is
impious, to all
from heaven. There
the
is
no
The
early tribe or nation
a religious partnership, on
member by
a
is
A
thing
far oftenest a conservative force,
is
the old habit. Daily imi-
is
most frequent models are ancient. however, something new is necessary for every man and for every
is
a rash
course,
nation.
We may
tomorrow
conceived thus,
becomes wicked.
common tation
Of
sudden impiety may bring
utter ruin. If the state toleration
which
said that these
for the
"limited liability" in the political notions of that time.
to himself.
two tendencies world— that to persecution and that to imitation— must conflict; that the imitative impulse would lead men to copy what is new, and that persecution by traditional habit would prevent their copying it. But in practice the two tendencies co-operate. There is a strong tendency to copy the most common thing, and that
individual taint consequent on choice and
ceived to
much
of the early
an
is
may be
It
believe, or think of
believing,
harm
fear of
own
only for his
action;
"law" or not,
barbarian can bear to see one of his
person
human
lated
shall
not be like
upon
permitted
us,
it.
wish,
be
if
we
please, that
like today,
New
but
it
will
impinge
forces will
new wind, new rain, and the light and we must alter to meet
deviation from the transmitted ordinances
of another sun;
becomes simple
them. But the persecuting habit and the
folly. It is
a sacrifice of the
happiness of the greatest number. It is allowing one individual, for a moment's
imitative
combine
to insure that the
thing shall be in the old fashion;
pleasure or a stupid whim, to bring terrible
an alteration, but
and irretrievable calamity upon all. No one will ever understand even Athenian history if he forgets this idea of the old world, though Athens was, in comparison with others, a rational and skeptical place, ready for new views and free from old
of variety as possible.
prejudices.
When
the
street
Hermes were mutilated, were frightened and that
they should
all
statues
pulse
to
this,
new
must be
shall contain as little
The
imitative im-
because
men most
what their minds are best prepared for— what is like the old, yet with
easily imitate
the
inevitable
minimum
of
alteration;
what throws them least out of the old path, and puzzles least their minds. The doctrine of development means this: that in un-
of
the Athenians
avoidable changes
furious; they thought
all
tends
it
it
be ruined because
trine
449
which
is
men
like the
new
doc-
most of a "preservative addi-
Great Books Library
The
tion" to their old doctrines.
like
alive the
who
practice— an additional turret in the
old style. It
this
is
and
things
process
adding suitable
of
discordant
rejecting
fathers
The most
gratifying child
ing
would be the best specimen
Even
so, I
clination
think there will be a disinattribute
to
so
marked,
them;
ter to causes so
evanescent as the imitation
and the persecution
of appreciated habit
only some wild abnormal intellect could
of detested habit. But, after
have hit upon. And wild and abnormal indeed would be that intellect if it were a single one at all. But in fact such manners are the growth of ages, like Roman law or the British Constitution. No one man— no one generation— could have thought of them; only a series of generations trained in the habits of the last and wanting something akin to such habits, could have devised them. Savages pet their favorite habits, so to say, and preserve them as they do their favorite animals; ages are required, but at last a national character is formed by the confluence of congenial attractions and accordant detestations.
character
there
infant
and
in
life,
this
is
childhood.
most
The
habits
enforced on the child; dies.
The
fit
to
imitation
if
the
of
he
lives;
is
if
by habits than
national
And
this
is
it
by anything is
else.
In
sure to be formed,
and sure to be passed on if only the causes have specified be fully in action and without impediment. As I have said, I am not explaining the origin of races, but of nations, or, if you like, of tribes. I fully admit that no imitation of predominant manner, or prohibitions of detested manners, will of themI
selves account for the broadest contrasts
of
human
a
are
red
Such means would no Negro out of a Brahmin, or
nature.
more make
Spartan
man
a
out of an Englishman, than
washing would
change the spots of a
leopard or the color of an Ethiopian.
he cannot he
Some
more potent causes must co-operate, or we should not have these enormous diversities. The minor causes I deal with made Greek
which assimilates early
nations continues through life, but it begins with suitable forms and acts on picked specimens. I suppose, too, that there is a
from Greek, but they did not make We cannot precisely mark the limit, but a limit there clearly is. to differ
the Greek race.
kind of parental selection operating in the to
universal.
less
time an ingrained type
able to catch
same way and probably tending
or
all,
for a collection of
mind of the parent (as we speak) passes somehow to the body of the child. The transmitted "something" is more affected
be a good tribe
more
name
and this persecution in long generations have vast physical effects. The
a kind of selection
is
but a
is
imitation
states of
likely to survive a
and copy them he
habits
a great mortality of
the child most
itself:
Spartan
is
fixed,
almost physical a thing as national charac-
regard them as "monstrosities," which
Another cause helps. In early
of the
standard then and there raised up.
make the traveler think much whether they are good or whether they are bad, as wonder how
civilization
would be
the best looked after, and the most gratify-
tain villages, they
to think of
their
ing tribal manners and the existing tribal tastes.
not so
anyone could have come
individuals.
gratified
a credit to the tribe according to the lead-
things
which has raised those scenes of strange manners which in every part of the world puzzle the civilized men who come upon them first. Like the old headdress of moun-
to
same
Those children and mothers most would be most tenderly treated by them, and have the best chance to live, and as a rough rule their favorites would be the children of most "promise"— that is to say, those who seemed most likely to be
imitative
and the persecuting tendencies make all change in early nations a kind of selective conservatism, for the most part keeping what is old, but annexing some new but
keep
450
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
we look at the human race, we
nant of the one variety of
of
paintings
earliest
or
live
we
sculptures
oft
anywhere have give us the present conof
trasts
present
Within
observation.
memory no such created
those
as
between
minor modifications, and modifications.
And
we
two explanations;
some imitable
in
respects adapted to the struggle for
trace
only
and which copied its leader, would have an enormous advantage in the struggle for life. It would be sure to win and live, for it would be coherent and adapted, whereas, in comparison, competing tribes would be incoherent and unadapted. And I suppose
see only minor
life,
that in early times, when those bodies did not already contain the records and the
that these
first,
whose leader was
tribe,
start
how any number of such modifications could change man as he is in one race-type to man as he is in some other. Of this there are but
protective habit also struck out in
such a time would have a far greater effect than it could afterwards. A gregarious
very hard to see
is
it
him, and so of the Esquimo or the
We
between Esquimos and Goths.
we
Immigrants died
they produced him or something
Any
historical
Greek, between Papuan and red Indian,
with cardinal diversities;
Africa.
without
existed could
American.
have been Negro and
differences
interior
in till
like
types as strongly as
dissimilar
man who
more adaptiveness than then
find these race-charac-
decided as the race-characters now.
ters as
The
monuments
earliest
If
the
great types were originally separate cre-
stand— that the Negro was and the Greek made so. But this
any new
ations, as they
traces
made
mark on the heritable element, and would be transmitted more easily and more certainly. In such an age, man being softer and more pliable, deeper race-marks would be more easily inscribed and would be more likely
so,
hypothesis
easy
has
creation
special
of
habit
been tried so often, and has broken down so very often, that in no case, probably, do any great number of careful inquirers very firmly believe provisionally,
present,
as
They may accept
it.
the
best
hypothesis
but they feel about
as
it
it
seems, they think
What
it
will
But
is
exactly
us.
But by is
far the
I
most plausible sugges-
only
those
(so
to
tried to
say)
haphazard individuals throve who were born with a protected nature— that is, a nature suited to the climate and the country,
fitted
shielded from
its
to
use
its
advantages,
natural diseases. Accord-
ing to Mr. Wallace, the Negro
is
as
marked
to
I
less
prove
how
contrasts
arise in each.
small contrasting groups
would certainly spring up within eachsome to last and some to perish. These are the eddies in each race-stream which vary its surface, and are sure to last till some new force changes the current. These minor varieties, too, would be infinitely compounded, not only with those of the same race, but with those of others. Since the beginning of man, stream has been a thousand times poured into stream— quick into sluggish, dark into pale— and eddies
wanderers was beyond concepthat
paper,
would Given large homogeneous populations, some Negro, some Mongolian, some Aryan, I have
of region; that consequently early morality
great;
this
probably and naturally
that of Mr. Wallace, that these race-
in the first
have no pretense
show how
marks are living records of a time when the intellect of man was not as able as it is now to adapt his life and habits to change
tion
I
matters;
cannot pretend to say. Possibly as yet the data for a confident opinion are not before tion
its
speak on such have so often explained, deals with nation-making and not with race-making. I assume a world of marked varieties of man, and only want to
they
be beaten again.
the other explanation
generations, easily fix
to continue legible.
at
cannot help feeling as to an army which has always been beaten; however strong it
endless
of
would more
the rem-
451
Great Books Library and waters have taken new shapes and colors, affected by what went before, but not resembhng it. And then on the fresh mass the old forces of composition and elimination again begin to act, and
NATION-MAKING
4.
new
new
create over the
surface another world.
"Motley was the wear" of the world when Herodotus first looked on it and described
and
to us,
thus, as
acter,
follow
will
it
the
that
effect
theories as to the primitive
common
their
we
of
ever
much
tell
be more easy to understand than it often seems and is put down in books. We get a notion that a change of government or a change of climate acts equally on the mass of a nation, and so are we puzzled— at least, I have been puzzled— to conceive how it acts. But such changes do not at first act equally on all people in the nation. On many, for a very long time, they do not act at all. But they bring out new qualities, and advertise the effects of new habits. A change of cHmate, say from a depressing to an invigorating one, so acts. Everybody feels it a little, but the most active feel it exceedingly. They labor and prosper, and their prosperity invites imitation. Just so with the contrary change, from an animating to a relaxing place—
the line of descent.
happy
us
of an ancestor very high
least idea (even
We
upon the
full
we
first
man, if I may so say— of he existed some short time (as we reckon shortness), some ten thousand
Paulo-pre-historic
man now
as
years, before history began. Investigators
whose acuteness and diligence can hardly be surpassed— Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Tylor are the chiefs
much and
collected so
among them— have explained so much
that they have left a fairly vivid result.
me to be, if I my own words, that the modern pre-historic men— those of whom That
result
may sum
we have to
as they
whom
toms of
it
is,
up
or seems to
in
many remains, and due the ancient, strange cus-
collected so are
historical nations (the fossil cus-
we might
corrupted.
they are stuck by themselves in real
on a nation accumulating
power
it
acts
is
any considerable change thus an intensifying and
With
effect.
its
zation,
them
genial individuals; in
results,
maximum is
it
call
them, for very often
and have no more part
in
it
civili-
than
the fossils in the surrounding strata)— prehistoric
men
in
this
sense were "savages
without the fixed habits of savages." That
on some prepared and con-
produce attractive
man;
can get a very tolerable idea of the
toms,
effect of
in
assumption
of the theory of evolution) of the
but
up
cannot get the
do nothing that the naturally active are
The
was
are to
ordinary agencies upon that character will
the naturally lazy look so
ancestor
have a distinct conception of him, it can only be after long years of future researches and the laborious accumulation of materials, scarcely the beginning of which now exists. But science has already done something for us. It cannot yet tell us our first ancestor, but it can like. If
it
formation of national char-
ful ones, in the
11
know what
seems to me, were its varying colors produced. If it be thought that I have made out that these forces of imitation and elimination be the main ones, or even at all powerit
man must be very uncertain. Granting the doctrine of evolution to be true, man must be held to have a common ancestor with the rest of the Primates. But then we do not A
l\
seen to
is
and then the
to say that, like savages, they
passions and
weak
had strong
reason; that, like sav-
habits creating those results are copied far
ages, they preferred short spasms of greedy
and wide. And,
as
pleasure to mild and equable enjoyment;
simple but
quite
not
I
believe,
it
obvious
is
in this
way
that, like savages,
that
they could not postpone
the process of progress and of degradation
the present to the future; that, like savages,
may
their ingrained sense of morality was, to
generally be seen to run.
452
Bagehot: Physics and Politics it, rudimentary and defecunhke present savages, they had not complex customs and singuhir customs, odd and seemingly inexplicable
whole territory would have been theirs, and theirs only. We cannot imagine innumerable races to have lost, if they had once had it, the most useful of all habits of mind— the habit which would most ensure
say the best of tive.
But
that,
rules guiding
human
all
life.
And
the rea-
sons for these conclusions as to a race too
victory
their
the
in
incessant
contests
ancient to have left memorials, are briefly
which, ever since they began, men have carried on with one another and with
these:
nature, the habit
ancient to leave
we
First, that
a history,
but not too
cannot imagine a strong
which
in historical times
has above any other received for
reason without attainments; and, plainly,
its
pos-
session the victory in those contests.
we may be sure that the moralman was as imperfect
men had not attainments. They would never have lost them if they had. It is utterly incredible that whole races of men in the most distant parts of the world
and as rudimentary as his reason. The same sort of arguments apply to a self-
(capable of counting, for they quickly learn
restraining morality of a high type as apply
Thirdly,
pre-historic
to count) ing,
if
should have
lost the art of
they had ever possessed
incredible that
whole races could
common
elements of
count-
it.
It
knowledge as to things material and things mental— the Benjamin Franklin philosophy —if they had ever known it. Without some
must "work upon sence of
we
if
it
is
if
so
men
A
single
Australian
fire,
else;
far too useful a gift to the
they had once attained lost all
of the moral rules
huge an advantage in the struggles no others would have surthem.
a
who
but
who
could
command
savages have
human race when
it.
many
have scarcely the eager to
kill
all
savages
many
to tribal
who
can
who family feelings; who are old people (their own
hardly be said to care for
tribe
But innumerable
but completely
most conducive
welfare. There are
of nations that
capable of such a habit, and really
make
ever to have been thoroughly lost
such races were conceivable
(really
kind of
has been
it
nature any further. Exshrewd farsightedness, a sound morality on elementary transactions
was
vived
who had no
actly also like a
without an educated reason) would have
had
could indeed
hardly
capable of postponing the present to the future (even
five;
only the grossest and simplest
could hardly do anything
is
certain that races of
among
could not count more than
roughly said, had "no pots and no pans";
who
were not
their reason
but im-
all
it is
writing or reading; who, as
than ours, relatively
they were stronger, for weaker than our reason.
who
forms of language;
they had no "stuff."
their passions
stronger
absolutely
Again,
man
elements of reason as far
Even, therefore,
of the two) that
who had
stuff."
are trained,
more
people
And, in the abthe common knowledge which
trains us in the as
the
possible to conceive their existence
cannot
work. As Lord Bacon said, the mind of
to
upon grounds recommended by
argument. Both are so involved in difficult intellectual ideas (and a high morality
lose the
man
postponement of the present
to a settled
the future
is
sense, the elementary
data the reasoning faculties of
of pre-historic
ity
human
life;
would have conquered all Australia almost as the English have conquered it. Imagine a race of long-headed
parents included) as soon as they get old
Scotchmen, even as ignorant as the Australians—and they would have got from Torres
constant tradition of terror, wish to conceal
practicing
it)
no matter how
and become a burden; who have scarcely the sense of truth; who, probably from a everything, and
was
"rather
the resistance of the other Australians.
The
riage are so
453
lie
would
(as observers say)
than not"; whose ideas of mar-
fierce
to Bass's Straits,
vague and
slight that the idea
Great Books Library
"communal marriage"
(in
women
common
of the tribe are
which
the
kind
in
to all the
The
intuitive
all
men, and them only) has been invented denote
Now
it.
and how
if
we
consider
human
fortifying to
how
so thinking about our ancestors.
which most opposed to has lately taken a new development. It not now maintained that all men have
would be
to
cohesive
it,
societies are
is
theory of morality,
that naturally
the love of truth, and the love of parents,
the same amount of conscience. Indeed,
and a stable marriage tie, how sure such would be to make a tribe which possessed them wholly and soon victorious over tribes which were destitute of them, we shall begin to comprehend how un-
only a most shallow disputant
likely
that
is
it
masses
vast
moral
helps
speak of others.
conquest,
to
if
our late
lost all
not
not go as far as savages to learn that
to
or
taught
arguments suggested by researches converge upon it,
bore
relics
And
of the "ages
this is only
ing
before
have but
to
which, taken together,
we
it
the sense
goes
it is
to the intuition of
who
alike
num-
so defective
three; yet as far as three their
same
as those of civilized
people. Unquestionably, tions at
this.
all,
if
there are intui-
the primary truths of
are such. There
is
number them
a felt necessity in
it would be pedantry any proposition of morals was more certain than that five and five make
if
in
anything, and
to say that
ten.
not,
The
truths of arithmetic, intuitive or
cannot be acquired independently of experience, nor can those of morals be so either. Unquestionably they
first
like
it
which some savages are
that a really moral
tiquities,
call
want-
feelings
an intuitionist
ber, in
likens
intuitions are the
open Mr. Gladstone's
it is
this
He
have invented and then bowed down before them; how plain it is (when once explained) that they are an-
inconceivable
All
in all.
more than
in order to see with how intense an antipathy a really moral age would regard the gods and goddesses of Homer;
age should
lower classes
that they cannot really and easily count
Homer
how
of
persons, yet that as far as
would arrive long before the public issue was joined. There is no other
We
all
knows his case will now admit, but he will add that, though the amount of the moral sense may and does differ in different
one of several
such religions than
The
those
part
nicer
the
in
of morality.
disputants
of
completely.
in vmcivilized countries, are clearly
cases in which that great thinker has proved by a chance expression that he had exhausted impending controversies years before they arrived, and had perceived more or less the conclusion at which the
explanation
very
it
classes in civilized countries, like
years ago Mr. Jowett said that the classical
morality."
les-
we need only talk to the English poor to our own servants, and we shall be
son;
If
and concur in teaching it. Nor on this point does the case rest wholly on recent investigations. Many religions
differ in anything, they differ in the
intuitions,
tribes
safe, for all the
all
men
fineness
any reasoning is safe as to pre-historic man, the reasoning which imputes to him a deficient sense of morals is
did not
and the delicacy of their moral however we may suppose those feelings to have been acquired. We need
of
throughout the world should have these
who
understand even the plainest facts of human nature could ever have maintained it;
feelings
certainly
were aroused in life and by experience, though after that comes the difficult and ancient controversy whether an>thing peculiar to them and not to be found in the other facts of life is superadded to them
an English court-suit, or a
no one would use such things as implements of ceremony, except those who had inherited them from a past age, when there was nothing better. Nor is there anything inconsistent with our present moral theories of whatever S'^ont'-sacrificial knife, for
independently of experience out of the vigor of the
454
mind
itself.
No
intuitionist.
Bagehot: Physics and Politics century imagined him to be; on the con-
therefore, fears to speak of the conscience
of his pre-historic ancestor as imperfect,
trary,
rudimentary, or hardly to be discerned,
curious habits; his reason
much
same so as to square his theory to phiin modern facts, and that theory in the modern form may for
he has
to
admit
I
darkened by
is
The whole mind
stitions.
savage
so to say,
is,
of
modern
a
tattooed over with
monstrous images; there
not a smooth But there is no reason to suppose the minds of pre-historic men to be so cut and marked; on the place anywhere about
is
it.
contrary, the creation of these habits, these
must have
superstitions, these prejudices,
taken ages. In his nature,
man was
pre-historic
savage;
was
it is
the
it
may be
same
as a
said,
modem
only in his acquisition that he
different.
It may be objected that if man was developed out of any kind of animal (and this is the doctrine of evolution which, if it
questions, such as the reality of free will, as
twisted into a thousand
are frightened by a thousand cruel super-
be held along with them. Of course if an intuitionist can accept this conclusion as to pre-historic men, so assuredly may Mr. Spencer, who traces all morality back to our inherited experience of utility, or Mr. Darwin, who ascribes it to an inherited sympathy, or Mr. Mill, who with characteristic courage undertakes to build up the whole moral nature of man with no help whatever either from ethical intuition or from physiological instinct. Indeed of the everlasting it is,
is
a thousand strange prejudices; his feelings
the
consistently
or the nature of conscience,
his life
have
with the design of these papers to speak.
be not proved conclusively, has great probability and great scientific analogy in its
They have been discussed ever
favor) he
explained,
before
altogether
history of discussion begins; is
since the
human
divided, and most people
still
many
inconsistent
difficulties in
still
feel
every suggested theory,
and doubt if they have heard the last word argument or the whole solution of the problem in any of them. In the interest of sound knowledge it is essential to narrow to the utmost the debatable territory; of
how many
to see
ascertained facts there
which are consistent with all theories, how many may, as foreign lawyers would phrase it, be equally held in condominium by them. But though in these great characteristics are
there
is
historic toric
man
I
am
savage,
in
man some
another respect there
necessarily at that
first
possess
these
applied steadily to their sub-
The
curious "counting boys,"
the arithmetical prodigies,
by
who can work
a strange innate faculty the
most won-
derful sums, lose that faculty, always par-
few thousand years before history began, and not at all, at least not necessarily, the primitive man— was identical with a modern
is
ject matter.
least the sort of pre-his-
treating of, the
instincts;
intellect
reason to imagine that the pre-
man— at
would
would only gradually be lost; that in the meantime they would serve as a protection and an aid, and that pre-historic men, therefore, would have important helps and feelings which existing savages have not. And probably of the first men, the first beings worthy to be so called, this was true: they had, or may have had, certain remnants of instincts which aided them in the struggle of existence, and as reason gradually came these instincts may have waned away. Some instincts certainly do wane when the animal
opinion
tially,
sometimes completely,
if
they are
taught to reckon by rule like the rest of mankind. In like manner I have heard it
is
man
could soon reason himself
equal or greater reason to suppose that
said that a
he was most unlike a modern savage. A modern savage is anything but the simple being which philosophers of the eighteenth
out of the instinct of decency
if
he would
only take pains and work hard enough.
And perhaps 455
other primitive instincts
may
Great Books Librarij have
in like
manner passed away. But
does not affect
my
argument.
saying that these instincts,
if
away— that
existed, did pass
period, probably an
I
law, once for
this
immense period
was as
human history, when men lived much as savages
all,
assumed that he could
not be ascertained. Of course no remains
only
which prove this or anything else about the morality of pre-historic man; and morality can only be described by remains amounting to a history. But one of
they ever
there
reckon time in historic
am
exist
a
we
pre-
the
live
axioms
of
pre-historic
investigation
now, without any important aids and helps. The proofs of this are to be found in the great works of Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Tylor, of which I just now spoke. I can only bring out two of them here. First, it is plain that the first pre-historic men had
binds us to accept this as the morality of the pre-historic races if we receive that
which the lowest savages use, and we can trace a regular improvement in the finish and in the efficiency of their
mary
the
axiom.
and race probably indicates that the
which we see at this day in the upward transition from the lowest savages to the it
is
not conceivable that a
race of beings with valuable instincts sup-
porting their existence and supplying their
wants would need these simple tools. They are exactly those needed by very poor people who have no instincts, and those were used by such, for savages are the poorest of the poor. It would be very strange if these same utensils, no more no less, were used by beings whose discerning instincts made them in comparison altogether rich. Such a being would know how to manage without such things, or, if it wanted any,
ficiency
just as
it is
savages. "Maternity,"
it
among
a matter of fact, paternity
is
A
societies. In all
mother,
the best
is
the best
germ
for a
a military discipline, a military drill,
and a military despotism. They were ready to obe>' their generals because they were compelled to obe>- their fathers; they conquered the world in manhood because as children they were bred in homes where the tradition of passionate valor was steadied by the habit of implacable order. And nothing of this is possible in loosely bound
a matter of
slave-owning
rule of law; the child kept the condition
the
cohesive "family"
life to
"is
communities— in Rome formerly, and in Virginia yesterday— such was the accepted of
is
campaigning nation. In a Roman family the boys, from the time of their birth, were bred to a domestic despotism, which well prepared them for a subjection in after
sion exactly conveys the connection of the
human
warlike power
did not possess that power." If this axiom be received, it is palpably applicable to the marriage-bond of primitive races.
opinion"; and this not very refined expres-
lower
a
evidence that the pre-historic
men
the lowest
has been said,
in
attainable
would know how to make better. And, secondly, on the moral side we know that the pre-historic age was one of much license, and the proof is that in that age descent was reckoned through the female only,
pri-
race did not possess that quality. If
one-armed people existed almost everywhere in every continent; if people were found in every intermediate stage, some with the mere germ of the second arm, some with the second arm half -grown, some with it nearly complete— then we should argue: "The first race cannot have had two arms, because men have always been fighting, and as two arms are a great advantage in fighting, one-armed and halfarmed people would immediately have been killed off the earth; they never could have attained any numbers. A diffused de-
simple instruments corresponding to that
Now
plain that the widespread ab-
the possessor in the conflicts between race
flint tools
highest.
It is
sence of a characteristic which greatly aids
whatever that condition
famih' groups
was; nobod}' inquired as to the father; the
lies
456
at
all)
(if
they can be called fami-
where the father
is
more or
Bagehot: Physics and Politics less uncertain,
where descent
through him, where, that not as
not traced
is
the second, a race with reason and high moral feeling beats a race with reason but without high moral feeling. And in
property does
is,
come from him, where such property he has passes to his sure relations— to
his
An
children.
sister's
the two are palpably consistent.
nation
ill-knit
There is every reason, therefore, suppose pre-historic man to be deficient
which did not recognize paternity as a legal relation would be conquered like a mob by any other nation which had a
morality.
vestige or a beginning of the patria po-
marriage" or
testas. If, therefore, all
the
much
men had
first
the strict morality of families, they
would
Romans would have permitted them in Italy. They would have conquered, killed, and plundered them before they became nations; and yet semi-moral the
arise
nations exist
over the world.
all
gain
was
of constancy which the African and others like him, had lost. How, then, if it was so beneficial, could they ever lose it? The answer is plain: they could lose it if they had it as an irrational propensity and habit, and not as a moral and rational feeling. When reason came, it would weaken that habit hke all other
of
reason
is
a force of
vigor— a victory-making agent
such incomparable efficiency— that
all
the
matter while.
if
it
The
grows
wins in both the cases in the
first,
itself
strongest
we
keep
wives;
their
that the
away
took the best wife
restive, did not like the
greatest
its
if
the wife
change, her
beat her; that (as in Australia
obscurity,
savage religions and
continually diminishing valuable instincts will not
to
man
now) a pretty woman was sure to undergo changes, and her back to bear the marks of many such chastisements; that in the principal department of human conduct (which is the most tangible and easily traced, and therefore the most obtainable specimen of the rest) the minds of pre-historic men were not so much immoral as unmoral: they did not violate a rule of conscience, but they were somehow not sufficiently developed for them to feel on this point any conscience, or for it to prescribe to them any rule. The same argument applies to religion. There are, indeed, many points of the
chief,
And
is
it
many such
instinct
infinite
and
new husband
ing to one wife, by saying it was "like the monkeys." The semi-brutal ancestors of man, if they existed, had very likely an
such
"primitive
of
from the weaker man; and that
expressed his disgust at adher-
irrational habits.
much what much room
strongest
first
who
the detail
"no marriage"— for that
in pre-historic times
men, could not have had close family instincts; and yet if they were like most though not all of the animals nearest to man they had such instincts. There is a great story of some African chief
to
in
regard that
Upon broad grounds we may believe that men fought both to
be said that this argument proves too much. For it proves that not only the somewhat-before-history men, but the abIt will
solutely
As
we
comes to— there is of course for discussion. Both Mr. M'Clennan and Sir John Lubbock are too accomplished reasoners and too careful investigators to wish conclusions so complex and refined as theirs to be accepted all in a mass, besides the fact that on some critical points the two differ. But the main issue is not dependent on nice arguments. pretty
no more have permitted the rise of semimoral nations anywhere in the world than to
of sexual morality, as
to
both
of pre-historic religion.
steadily
competitor
clear. All
are imagining;
stitions
a race with intelligent reason,
but without blind instinct, beats a race with that instinct but without that reason;
founded on
omens that some
the
present
But one point
savage religions are luck.
full of
is
super-
Savages believe
that casual
are a sign of
events;
trees
some animals
457
in
in the scanty vestiges
are
are lucky, that
coming
lucky,
that
some places
Great Books Library are lucky, that indifferent
some
indifferent actions-
and
apparently
as late
The
really— are lucky, and so of others in each class,
that they are unlucky.
Nor can
which causes the good or the
ill;
the
mind much the same; beyond savages
are to the savage
it is
a
game
They
are playing a
game— the
no knowledge of its rules. They have not an idea of the laws of nature; if they want to cure a man, they of life— with
have no conception
mon it.
If they try anything they must upon bare chance. The most useful modern remedies were often discovered in it
this bare, empirical
way.
What
sense as
The
should stop rheumatic pains, or mineral
covery.
make wounds
heal quickly?
at the first time, or at
And
is probably as anany sound knowledge as to medicine whatever. No doubt it was mere
average of
cient as
or pigeon
men
that tried these springs
in this
is
is
is
re-
that the
trials, is
the proximity of a hare
found
to
have no
not tried as in cases where
and where it
effect,
it
is.
The
nature of minds which are deeply engaged in
watching events of which they do not
know
one case misdirected
lous
them in a thousand cases. Some expedition had answered when the resolution to undertake it was resolved on under an ancient tree, and accordingly that tree became lucky and sacred. Another expedition failed when a magpie crossed its path, and a magpie was said to be unlucky. A serpent crossed the path of another expedition, and it had a marvelous victory, and accordingly the serpent became a sign of great luck (and what a savage cannot distinguish from it— a potent deity which makes luck). Ancient medicine
the only difference
cures take place as often in cases
and found them answer. Somebody by accident tried them and by that accident was instantly cured. The chance which happily directed
both
curative power of the mineral is persistent, and happens constantly; whereas, on an
knowledge of the marvelous
first
is,
some memo-
by a remarkable
rable time, followed
And
Both, somehow,
both answered— that
tried;
effect of gifted springs
casual luck at
are apt to imagine about
of nasty mineral water.
were were
yet the chance
we
lying
disease as the drinking certain draughts
could be
more improbable— at least, for what could a pre-historic man have less given a good reason— than that some mineral springs springs
I
between two halves of a hare or a pigeon was a priori, and to the inexperienced mind, quite as likely to cure
at all of true scientific
remedies. try
fever,
and a pigeon recently killed. ^^ Nothing can be plainer than that there is no ground for this kind of treatment, and that the idea of it arose out of a chance hit, which came right and succeeded. There was nothing so absurd or so contrary to com-
is
extremely natural that they should
believe so.
some disease— a
forget,
I
think— is supposed to be cured by placing the patient between two halves of a hare
required consistently to distinguish them.
And
collection of prescriptions published
unless
indicating precedent and the causing being steadiness of head far
Middle Ages it was founded on mere luck.
as the
under the direction of the Master of the Rolls abounds in such fancies, as we should call them. According to one of them,
a
savage well distinguish between a sign of "luck" or ill-luck, as we should say, and a deity
down
full of superstitions
indifferent
the reason
is
11 Readers of Scott's
an admirer of
some fabusome wonderful
to single out
accompaniment
or
remember that humble life proposed
life will
his in
him of inflammation of the bowels by making him sleep a whole ni^ht on twelve smooth stones, painfully collected by the admirer from twehe brooks, which to cure
appeared, a recipe of sovereign power. Scott gra\'ely told the proposer that he had mistaken the charm, and that the stones were of no \ irtue unwas,
it
traditional
less wrapped up in the petticoat of a widow who never wished to marry again; and, as no such widow seems to have been
forthcoming,
equally unreasonable:
458
lie
escaped the remedy.
Bagehot: Physics and Politics good luck or bad luck, and
of
series
if
it
not
to
dread ever after that accompaniment if brings evil, and to love it and long for
mention
this,
but
more modest
to
trivial;
it
modern
thought
brings good. All savages are in this
teaches
anything,
and the fascinating effect of striksome single case) of singular good fortune and singular calamity is one great source of savage position,
occasional
ing accompaniments (in
to
Gamblers
to this
day
are,
much
the
same plight as savages with respect to the main events of their whole lives. And we
To
know how this
superstitious they
all
lives
But
child
boys set to
them out
The worst
ible,
and they have not
is still
as yet
been thor-
made than the other fish we had. gave the best evidence of our belief in its power to "bring luck"; we fought for it (if our elders were out of the way); we ofi:ered to buy it with many other fish from the envied holder, and I am sure I often
We
it
if the chance of the game away from me. Persons who stand
are, will
say that
much now be.
like,
is
that thought as
of these superstitions
would believe would be an accepted
is
that
it,
and
idol.
in a
And
I
requires a long table of statistics of the
games
disprove
this
thor-
oughly; and by the time people can
make
of
to
above such beliefs, and do not need to have them disproved. Nor in many cases where omens or amulets are used would such tables be easy to tables they are already
any ought
if
I
it
results
cried bitterly
still
very
philosopher
aged repository of guiding experiencewould have an equal power of creating superstitions. But once created they are most difficult to eradicate. If anyone said that the amulet was of certain efficacy— that it always acted whenever it was applied—it would of course be very easy to disprove; but no one ever said that the "pretty fish" always brought luck; it was only said that it did so on the whole, and that if you had it you were more likely to be lucky than if you were without it. But
impress-
for the dignity of philosophy,
And
boyhood.
a grave
suspect the Nestor of a savage tribe— the
had considerable faith in a certain which was larger and more
such there
early for
the lesser boys
nicely
up
the lower races as the "pretty
am
week
"pretty fish,"
it
do not hesitate
learned and elaborate
even a single run of luck be necessary. sure that if an elder boy said, "The pretty fish was lucky— of course it was," all I
have idolatries— at least I know that years ago a set of boy loo-players, of whom I was
took
of
if
oughly subjected to the confuting experience of the real world. And child gamblers
one,
it
value
make and hard to destroy. A single run of luck has made the fortime of many a charm and many idols. I doubt
gamblers— a number of little play loo— are just in the position
of savages, for their fancy
I
of
if
they are easy to
minds.
of their
so,
anything can
knowledge, too much organized sense, to prolong or cherish such
drive
teaches,
cardinal
facts.
thoughts are as
them, though, nevertheless, they cannot entirely
spirit
separated from primitive thought by the whole length of human culture; but an impressible child is as near to, and its
day very sensible whist-players
they are ashamed of entertaining
ideas;
the
many
my
of
naturally
are.
gentle maledictions if they turn up as a trump the four of clubs, because it brings ill-luck, and is "the devil's bedpost." Of course grown-up gamblers have too much
common
among
fish"
have a certain belief— not, of course, a fixed conviction, but still a certain impression—that there is "luck under a black deuce," and will half mutter some not very
general
plainly
seems
it
explanations of the totem, the "clan" deity
with respect to
the chance part of their game, in
little
say that
because
—the beast or bird who, in some supernatural way, attends to the clan and watches over it— do not seem to me to be nearly as akin to the reality as it works and
religions.
well
the
it
459
Great Books Library make,
be found; and subdue the superstition instance may easily end in
for the data could not
event, really innocuous but to their minds
a rash attempt to
foreboding, arrests and frightens them.
by a
religion full of
striking
confirming
it.
Newman,
Francis
markable narrative of
in the re-
tune,
his experience as a
tion
missionary in Asia, gives a curious example
As he was setting out on a distant and somewhat hazardous expedition, his native servants tied round the neck of the mule a small bag supposed to be of preventive and mystic virtue. As the place was crowded and a whole townspeople looking on, Mr. Newman thought that he would take an opportunity of disproving the superstition. So he made a long speech of explanation in his best Arabic, and cut off all
number
is
moved by
stitions as to luck
would be
at the
The
auspices, while
was
men
religion with-
in the
world could have
it would have been crushed out and destroyed. But, on the contrary, all over the world religions with omens once existed, in most they still exist; all savages have them, and deep in the most ancient
titute of
civilizations
we
find the plainest traces of
them. Unquestionably therefore the prehistoric religion was like that of savages— viz.,
that
in
it
largely
consisted
in
the
watching of omens and in the worship of lucky beasts and things, which are a sort of embodied and permanent omens. It may indeed be objected— an analogous
A
mercy which
was taken as to the ascertained moral deficiencies of pre-historic mankind objection
—that,
if
nicious
this religion of
and
omens was
so likely to ruin a race,
so per-
no race
it. But it is only contending with an-
would ever have acquired likely to ruin a race
The omens— not an
other race otherwise equal.
necessity of consulting the it
early
the greater
military advantage, the small minority des-
was not subject to them. In historical times, as we know, the panic terror at eclipses has been the ruin of the armies which have felt it; or has made them delay to do something necessary, or rush to do something destructive.
all
come into existence with omens; the immense majority possessing the superior
these super-
of a nation, in other respects equal,
all
if
much
men, had a
of early
anywhere
ligion,
about him.
their military inexpediency.
at
out omens, no religion, or scarcely a re-
the present point as to these super-
nation which was
with a nation
out omens. Clearly then,
would have it, the mule had not got thirty yards up the street before she put her foot into a hole and broke her leg; upon which all the natives were confirmed in their former faith in the power of the bag, and said, "You see now what happens to unbelievers."
Now
fight
unanimously, or even
But, as ill-fortune
stitions
to
set
if
equal otherwise that had a religion with-
of this.
the bag, to the horror of
A
omens is a military misforand would bring a nation to destruc-
discovery of these
gant thing in an early age, as
sincerely practiced
and before it became a trick for disguising foresight, was in classical history very dangerous. And much worse is it with savages, whose life is one of omens, who must always consult their sorcerers, who may be turned this way or that by some chance accident, who, if they were intellectually able to frame a consistent military policy— and some savages in war see farther than in anything else— are yet liable to be put out, distracted, confused, and turned aside in the carrying out of it, because some
I
fancied extrava-
have
tried
show, not a whit then to be distinguished as improbable from the discover)
to
of healing herbs or springs toric
of
men
omens was an
went. race
which
pre-his-
also did discover— the discovery
And
if
in
act of reason as far as
it
reason the omen-finding
was superior
to the races in conflict
would win, and we may conjecture that omen-finding races were thus superior since they won and prevailed in ever\' latitude and in
with
it,
the omen-finding race
everv zone.
460
Bagehot: Physics and Politics In
we would
therefore
particulars
all
the main races of
keep to our formula, and say that prehistoric man was substantially a savage like
began
termixture no
present savages, in morals, intellectual
from our present savages
bad
they have.
on
his
ages.
in that
They have had ages
mind
they
new
in-
ones have been formed
was a process singularly active in and singularly quiescent in later Such differences as exist between the
early ages,
Aryan, the Turanian, the Negro, the red
he had not had time to ingrain his nature so deeply with bad habits, and to impress beliefs so unalterably
men were formed;
very early, and except by
since. It
attainments, and in religion; but that he differed
to exist
man, and the Australian are differences greater altogether than any causes now active are capable of creating in present men, at least in any way explicable by us. And there is, therefore, a strong presumption
as
to fix the
on themselves, but primitive man was younger and had no such time. I have elaborated the evidence for this conclusion at what may seem needless and tedious length, but I have done so on account of its importance. If we accept it, and if we are sure of it, it will help us to many most important conclusions. Some of these I have dwelt upon in previous papers, but I will set them down again. stain
now
that (as great authorities
hold) these
were created before the nature of men, especially before the mind and the adaptive nature of men, had taken their differences
existing constitution. tion
a second condiat
have been equally inherited, the doctrine of evolution be true, from
least to if
And
precedent of civilization seems,
me,
to
some previous
state or condition.
I
at least
men
what
find
it
was about, so to speak, before history. It was making, so to say, the intellectual consistence— the connected and
like
the present men, unless existing in
First,
it
will in part explain to us
the world
something
to prefer,
enjoyment, the abiding capacity if
conceive of
like families— that
is,
in
at all
groups
avowedly connected, at least on the mother's side, and probably always with a vestige of connection, more or less, on the father's side— and unless these groups were like many animals, gregarious, under a
coherent habits, the preference of equable to violent
difficult to
required, the future to the
present, the mental prerequisites without
which civilization could not begin to exist, and without which it would soon cease to exist even had it begun. The primitive man, like the present savage, had not these
more or less fixed. It is almost beyond imagination how man, as we know man, could by any sort of process have
prerequisites, but, unlike the present sav-
a great advantage, to say the least of
age, he
was capable
of acquiring
leader
gained
them and
this step in civilization.
in the evolution
theory that
remit this difficulty to
And
it
is it,
enables us
it
a pre-existing
of being trained in them, for his nature
to
was
and pos-
period in nature, where other instincts and
to say, his
powers than our present ones may perhaps have come into play, and where our imagination can hardly travel. At any rate, for the present I may assume these two steps in human progress made, and these two
still
sibly,
soft
and
strange as
still it
impressible,
may seem
outward circumstances were more favorable to an attainment of civilization than those of our present savages. At any rate, the pre-historic times were spent in making men capable of writing a history, and having something to put in it when it is written, and we can see how it was done. Two preliminary processes indeed there are which seem inscrutable. There was some strange preliminary process by which
conditions realized.
The
rest of the
two conditions, is
the erection
is
of
way,
if
plainer.
we
grant these
The
first
what we may
thing call
a
custom-making power— that is, of an authoritv which can enforce a fixed rule of
461
Great Books Library life;
which, by means of that fixed
important object of early legislation was
rule,
some degree create a calculable future, which can make it rational to postpone present violent but momentary pleacan
the enforcement of lucky
in
like
it
ensures,
is
of
only
mean
anything which to himself,
that the
it
shall
this
knew what
be the
not at
all,
of
and property,
life
result,
it
or scarcely at as
all, it
markable.
people to in their
sharing in their
thing
common property of the family we should call private prop-
so small as to
if it
did,
be of no importance:
like the things little children are
it
It
does not at
I
all,
re-
is
like the notion
There are day who would not permit
this
sit
down
thirteen
They do not expect any it,
evil to it
or
but they cannot get out of
is
number
will
done. This
survival in culture.
come to harm if the what Mr. Tylor calls The faint belief in the
is
corporate liability of these thirteen
is
the
feeble relic and last dying representative
was was
now
the tribe as well.
heads the idea that some one or more
of the
group; what
erty hardly then existed; or
all
themselves particularly for permitting
the separate property of the individual,
but the
but to
house people to
to dinner.
not
is
would
or
of desert, cleave to the doer.
to
be by the eighteenth-century theory of government. Even in early historical ages —in the youth of the human race, not its childhood— such is not the nature of early states. Sir Henry Maine has taught us that the earliest subject of jurisprudence
was unlucky
contagiousness of the idea of "luck"
the protection
was assumed
which
have said so much about "luck" and about its naturalness before that I ought to say nothing again. But I must add that the
was doing, little as it would have cared if it had known. The conscious end of early societies was as
hardly any which has not a conception
bring a "curse"— might cause evil not only
thing in early society was an authority
whose action
little
controversy
member has not some such belief that his own action or the action of any other member of it— that he or the others doing
any authority of which these shall be the We must have traveled ages (unless all our evidence be wrong) from the first men before there was a comprehenI
in a great
each
motives.
first
do not
I
because that
of luck for the tribe as a tribe, of
shall find in early society
sion of such motives.
rites.
rites,
power, or even the existence, of early religions. But there is no savage tribe without a notion of luck; and perhaps there
joyment of the contingent expected recompense will be received. Of course I am not
we
religious
as to the
what else is not sure, that if the what is in hand be made, en-
saying that
say
would involve me
sure for future continual pleasure, because
sacrifice of
to
of that great principle of corporate liability to
al-
good and
fortune which has
ill
such an immense place
lowed to call their own, which they feel it very hard to have taken from them, but which they have no real right to hold and keep. Such was our earliest property-law, and our earliest life-law was that the lives of all members of the family group were at the mercy of the head of the group. As far as the individual went, neither his goods nor his existence were protected at all. And this may teach us that something else was lacked in early societies besides what in our societies we now think of. I do not think I put this too high when I say that a most important if not the most
The
traces of
it
filled
in the world.
are endless.
You can
hardly take up a book of travels in rude
wanted to do was not permitted, for the natives feared it might bring ill luck regions without finding: "I so
and
on the
so.
But
I
'party,' or
perhaps the
tribe."
Mr.
Galton, for instance, could hardly feed his people.
The Damaras, he
berless superstitions about
place, each
very troublesome. In the
first
tribe, or rather family,
prohibited from
eating
cattle
of
"who come from 462
have nummeat which are
says,
is
certain
colors,
savages
the sun" eschewing sheep
Bagehot: Physics and Politics spotted in a particular way, which those
that the doing of
"who come from the
number
he
rain" have no objec-
will
any one thing by any be "unlucky," that is, will
says, "there are five or six
bring an intense and vast liability on them
eandas or descents, and I had men from most of them with me, I could hardly kill a sheep that everybody would eat"; and he could not keep his meat, for it had to
prevent the doing of that thing more than anything else. They will deal with the most
tion to. "As,"
cherished chief
be given away because it was commanded by one superstition, nor buy milk, the staple food of those parts, because it was
And
prohibited by another.
so
end. Doing anything unlucky
in
what putting on something
idea
tracts the electric fluid
not be sure that
is
harm
do
in fact.
I
their
that at-
contrary,
You can-
one that letteth out water." He cannot tell what are the consequences of his act, who will share them, or how they can be prevented. In the earliest historical nations
the
that
corporate
I
need
liabilities
of
modern student their most curious feature. The belief is indeed raised far above the notion of mere "luck," be-
states
a
to
is
cause there a
god
whom
is
The it
liable to the curse
all
known
to everyone.
Not
was immeasureven reasonably was greater. The dread of
say,
it
it
if
is
that over
The
possessed with the
the primal usages of the tribe
can also manage to look at
who
herited usage. Sir
of nature
is
to
an
in-
glish
government
cases
made new and
in
India has in
many
great works of
irri-
gation, of
other powers. If a tribe or a nation have,
come
as
in his last
which no ancient Indian government ever thought; and it has generally
superior to that of any
contagious fancy,
it
Henry Maine,
work, gives a most curious case. The En-
those powers, is properly, upon grounds of reason, as much greater than any other dread as the might of the pow-
rule
a
is
custom certain retribution would happen. To this day many semi-civilized races have great difficulty in regarding any arrangement as binding and conclusive unless they
Naturally,
the powers of nature, or of the beings
by
peculiar in early societies
idea that,
greater than any anxiety about
ably greater.
ers
the
described as a
ple believed that for any breach of sacred
is
so
personal property, but
we may
was
On
through ancient
and
iety so created
only was
to us,
strength of the corporate anx-
Romans— are
engendered; history.
that this strange
seems
be broken, harm unspeakable will happen in ways you cannot think of, and from sources you cannot imagine. As people nowadays believe that "murder will out," and that great crime will bring even an earthly punishment, so in early times peo-
still
Not only the mutilator of the Hermae, but all the Athenians— not only the violator of the rites of the Bona dea, the
it
or later a semi-supernatural sanction.
survives.
all
mean
man might be
whole community
the act offends. But the indis-
criminate character of the punishment
but
of course
most of these customs there grows sooner
a distinct belief in gods or
is
should
custom-making animal with more justice than by many of the short descriptions. In whatever way a man has done anything once, he has a tendency to do it again: if he has done it several times he has a great tendency so to do it, and, what is more, he has a great tendency to make others do it also. He transmits his formed customs to his children by example and by teaching. This is true now of human nature, and will always be true, no doubt. But what
be done, fault, but to
phrase, doing
not say
do not
the sole source of early customs.
him too. As in the Scriptural what is of evil omen is "like
those about
who even by chance
as in a similar case the sailors dealt
condition of mind, as
will not
not only to the person in
it,
with Jonah.
on without is
then that tribe and that nation will
all,
believe
left
463
it
to the native village
community
to
Great Books Library say what share each mail of the village
should have
in the
(the speech of such communities
water; and the village
and would vary
varying),
have accordingly laid down a most minute rules about it. But the peculiarity is that in no case do these rules "purport to emanate from the per-
One
authorities
rections.
series of
sociations set
sonal authority of their author or authors,
which
rests on grounds of reason, not on grounds of innocence and sanctity; nor do they assume to be dictated by a sense of
equity; there
is
always,
I
am
which
is
to
much
of
of the
imagine a rule
custom-making
groups in early society must have been
by the easy divisions of of the world— all Europe, for example— was then covered by the primeval forest; men had only conquered, and as yet could only conquer, a few plots and corners from it. These narrow spaces were soon exhausted, and if numbers grew some of the new people must move. Accordingly, migrations were constant, and were necessary. And these migrations were not like those of modern times. There was no such feeling as binds even Americans who hate— or speak as if they hated— the present political England, nevertheless to "the old home." There was then no organized means of communication greatly helped
that society.
—no
we may
often
is
for
speaking
purposes,
amounts to real and total no connected interchange of possible any longer. Separate
new
elements, the real regen-
And whatever be
the
truth or falsehood of the general dislike to
mixed and half-bred races, no such was probably applicable to the
suspicion
early mixtures of primitive society.
posing, as
is
likely,
Sup-
each great aboriginal
race to have had its own quarter of the world (a quarter, as it would seem, corresponding to the special quarters in which plants and animals are divided), then the
immense majority of the mixtures would be between men of different tribes but of the same stock, and this no one would object to, but everyone would praise. In general, too, the conquerors would be better than the conquered (most merits in
say,
members of the same who once went out from the
parent society went out forever; they
ence
and,
erators of society.
parted
group; those
philologists caff a dialectical differ-
infusion of
Much
practical communication,
between
arise,
what
and keep a distinct and special "luck." If it were not for this facility of new formations, one good or bad custom would long since have "corrupted" the world; but even this would not have been enough but for those continual wars, of which I have spoken at such length in the essay on "The Use of Conflict" that I need say nothing now. These are, by their incessant fractures of old images, and by their constant
obligatory but not traditional.
The ready formation
on another; sectional
groups soon "set up house"; the early societies begin a new set of customs, acquire
under which some customs water are supposed to have emanated from a remote antiquity, although, in fact, no such artificial supply had ever been so much as thought of." So difficult does this ancient race— like, it
and asand another differences would
act on one,
soon
thought
assured, a
as the distribution of
ancient world— find
always
set of causes, events,
would
difference:
sort of fiction
probably, in this respect so
is
in different di-
early
society
more or less military would not be very much
are
merits), but they
better, for the lowest steps in the ladder
left
no abiding remembrance, and they kept no abiding regard. Even the language of the parent tribe and of the descended tribe would differ in a generation or two. There being no written literature and no spoken intercourse, the speech of both would vary
of civilization are very steep, to
mount them
this is
is
and the
slow and tedious.
probably the better
produce a good and quick
if
464
in
And
they are to
effect in civiliz-
ing those they have conquered.
ence of the English
effort
The
experi-
India shows— if
it
Bagehot: Physics and Politics anything— that a highly civihzed fail in producing a rapidly excellent effect on a less civilized race, because it is too good and too different. The two are not en rapport together; the merits of the one are not the merits prized by the other; the manner-language of the one is not the manner-language of the other. The higher being is not and cannot be a model for the lower; he could not mold himself on it if he would, and would not if he could. Consequently, the two races have long lived together, "near and yet far off," daily seeing one another and daily interchanging superficial thoughts, but in the depths of their mind separated by a whole era of civilization, and so affecting one another only a little in comparison with what might have been hoped. But in early societies there were no such great differences, and the rather superior conqueror must have easily improved the rather inferior conquered. It is in the interior of these customary
shows race
impossible. Mr. Galton wishes that breeds
may
men should be created by matching men of marked characteristics with women
of
of like characteristics.
But surely
this
is
what nature has been doing time out of mind, and most in the rudest nations and hardest times. Nature disheartened in each generation the ill-fitted members of each customary group, and so deprived them of their full vigor or, if they were weakly, killed them. The Spartan character was formed because none but people with a Spartan make of mind could endure a Spartan existence. The early Roman character was so formed too. Perhaps all very marked national characters can be traced back to a time of rigid and pervading discipline. In modern times, when society is more tolerant, new national characters are
neither
so
strong,
so
featurely,
nor
so
uniform. In this
manner
society
pre-historic times. It
is
was occupied
in
consistent with and
explicable by our general principle as to
groups that national characters are formed.
savages, that society should for ages have
wrote a whole essay on the manner of this before, I cannot speak of it now. By proscribing nonconformist members for generations, and cherishing and rewarding
been so occupied, strange as that conclusion is, and incredible as it would be, if we had not been taught by experience to be-
As
I
lieve strange things.
Secondly, this principle and this con-
members, nonconformists become fewer and fewer, and conformists more and more. Most men mostly imitate what they see, and catch the tone of what they hear, and so a settled type— a persistent character— is formed. Nor is the process wholly mental. I cannot agree, though the greatest authorities say it, that no "unconscious selection" has been at work at the breed of man. If neither that nor conscious selection has been at work, how did there come to be these breeds, and such there are in the greatest numbers, though we call them nations? In societies tyrannically customary, uncongenial minds become first cowed, then melancholy, then out of health, and at last die. A Shelley in New England could hardly have lived, and a race of Shelley s would have been conformist
ception of pre-historic times explain to us the meaning and the origin of the old-
and strangest of social anomalies— an anomaly which is among the first things
est
history tells us: the existence of caste nations.
Nothing
at first sight stranger
is
than
the aspect of those communities where sevto be bound up together governed by its own rule of law, where no one pays any deference to the rule of law of any of the others. But if our principles be true, these are just the nations most likely to last, which would have a special advantage in early times, and would probably not only maintain themselves but conquer and kill out
eral nations
seem
—where each
others also.
The
earlv society,
465
is
as
characteristic necessity of
we have
seen,
is
strict
Great Books Library usage and binding coercive custom. But
and help
the obvious result and inevitable evil of
lineage and one monotonous rule.
that
is
monotony
much
be
different
no one can fellows, or can
in society;
"at
first,"
from
this
case,
his
than a nation of a single
itself,
because as
many
so
in
others
puzzling history of progress, the very
Such societies are necessarily weak from the want of variety in their elements. But a caste nation is various and composite, and has in a mode suited to early societies
tutions
the constant co-operation of contrasted per-
non-caste nation, but each caste
which
a later age
in
more monotonous than anything
greatest triumphs of civilization. In a primitive
caste
priestly caste
advantageous. Little popular and serving to
of action
little
de-
of
and were
An
in
was
in that
tacked on to
On
it
and
a warrior caste
if is
bound
to
defend
lasted
The head
is
or can
forces itself on
enter
it
to
long.
early,
Each
be
rid
are taught in one
same employment. all
still
con-
caste nations
though some have
color
in
the
singular
composite of these tessellated societies has an indelible and invariable shade. Thirdly, we see why so few nations have made rapid advance, and how many have become stationary. It is in the process of becoming a nation, and in order to be-
come
such, that they subjected themselves
to the influence
tionary.
which has made them
They could not become
sta-
a real na-
by a fixed law and usage, and it is the fixity of that law and usage which has kept them as they were ever since. I wrote a whole essay on this before, so I need say nothing now; and I only name it because it is one of the most important consequences of this view of society, if not indeed the most tion without binding themselves
is it.
the contrary, such a civilization will be
singularly likely to live.
mind
little likely
trained to the
have stopped
age only
it
tion will not perish
who
of is
tinued to progress. But
such,
was protected by a notion that whoever hurt them would certainly be punished by heaven. In this class apart discoveries were slowly made and some beginning of mental discipline was slowly matured. But such a community is necessarily unwarlike, and the superstition which protects priests from home murder will not aid them in conflict with the foreigner. Few nations mind killing their enemies* priests, and many priestly civilizations have perished without record before they well began. But such a civilizapossible
for all
it
Several non-caste nations have
ages transmitted in such.
for
intellectual class
when
made
it,
way and
be popular nowadays as are most probably the be-
priestly hierarchies,
ginnings of science were
and type
each caste, and
especially
is
itself
is,
be, in a non-caste nation. Gradually a habit
age the division between the warrior
and the
insti-
which most aid at step number one are precisely those which most impede at step number two. The whole of a caste nation is more various than the whole of a
one of the
is
in
the
in
cultivate his difference.
sons,
say
I
apprehend that
I
of the
sage will help the arm of the soldier.
important.
That a nation divided into castes must be a most difficult thing to found is plain.
see,
Again, we can thus explain one of the most curious facts of the present world. "Manner," says a shrewd observer, who has seen much of existing life, "manner gets regularly worse as you go from the East to the West; it is best in Asia, not so good in Europe, and altogether bad in
last.
the western states of America."
Probably several
it
could only begin in a country
times conquered, and where the
boundaries of each caste rudely coincided
with the boundaries of certain
sets of vic-
and vanquished. But, as we now when founded it is a likely nation to
tors
A
community of many tribes and many usages is more likely to get on,
reason in
parti-colored
this:
dignified usage,
466
And
an imposing manner
which tends
the is
a
to preserve
Bagehot: Physics and Politics and
itself
also
along with
other existing usages
all
It
itself.
tends to induce the
obedience of mankind.
One
not a tradition
of the cleverest
day has a curious on the huntingfield, and in all collections of men, some men "snub and some men get snubbed"; and why society recognizes in each case the ascendancy or the subordination as if it was right. "It is not at all," Mr. Trollope fully explains, "rare ability which gains the supremacy; very often the ill-treated novelists of the present
dissertation to settle
man
why
quite as clever as the
is
Nor does
treats him.
it
man who
absolutely
not
will
it
in
man
do with
it.
On
in early society a dignified
essential importance;
an auxiliary
mode
it
is,
this
manner
is
him— though, were
infinitely
.
of sitting
and
rising),
in
which
in-
is
cluded a knowledge of the forms and society, and particuthose of Asiatic kings and their
manners of good larly
of
courts.
He was
quite aware, on his first arof the consequence of every step he took on such delicate points; he was, therefore, anxious to
rival
in Persia,
ceremonies
fight all his battles regarding
institutions
before he
and
royalty.
manner
came near the
We
footstool
of
were consequently plagued,
we landed at Ambusheher, till we reached Shiraz, with daily almost hourly drilling, that we might be perfect in our demeanour at all places, and under all circumstances.
from the moment
winning and calming mankind. To this day it is rare to find a savage chief without it; and almost always they greatly excel in it. Only last year a red Indian chief came from the prairies to see President Grant, and everybody declared that he had the best manners in Washington. The secretaries and heads of departments seemed vulgar to primary force
.
"Kaida-e-nishest-oo-berkhast" (or the art
mode. The competing instituwhich have now much superseded it
a
to
of such
read in books, and all I saw convinced of its truth. Fortunately the Elchee had resided at some of the principal courts of India, whose usages are very similar. He was, therefore, deeply versed in that important science denominated
of acquiring respect, but
the habitual ascendancy of grave
full
me
account
or venerated laws did not then exist;
was
is
the Persians very generally form opinion of the character of the country he represents. This fact I had .
then, not only
had not then begun. Ancient
and customs grow up
Asian society
it.
their
a principal tions
being so useful and so im-
things, if it should not rather be said to be composed of them. "From the spirit and decision of a public envoy upon ceremonies and forms," says Sir John Malcolm,
decides, no doubt truly,
ner or gait" of the supreme boy or to
rough English colony; the essentials of depend on far diff^erent
develop
ill-
man-
much
a
of,
depend
that in each case "something in the
has
is
or of less use, than in
less
And manner
group of men of itself gain an active power snub others. Schoolboys, in the same way," the novelist adds, "let some boys have dominion, and make other boys
And he
is
it
portant, usages
to
slaves."
it
America, for nowhere
influences.
miscellaneous
a
thought
in
civilization there
on wealth; for, though great wealth is almost always a protection from social ignominy, and will always ensure a passive respect,
and
of great value in those societies;
in
We
were carefully instructed where to where to stand or sit within-doors, when to rise from our seats, how far to advance to meet a visitor, and to what part of the tent or house we were to follow him when he departed, if he was of sufficient rank to ride in a procession,
of course, intrinsically they
above him, for he was only
make us stir a step. The regulations of our
"a plundering rascal." But an impressive
standings, and movings
manner had been a tradition in the societies in which he had lived, because it was
and
risings
were, however, of comparatively
467
and
reseatings, less
im-
Great Books Library portance than the time and manner of smoking our Kellians and taking our coffee. It
is
quite astonishing
how much
depends upon coffee and tobacco
quently
Men are gratified or offended, according to the mode in which these favourite refreshments are offered. You welcome a visitor, or send him off, by the way in which you call for a pipe or a cup of coffee. Then you mark, in the most minute manner, every shade of
repressed into
but starting
They could not
look steadily to a given end for an hour in their
pre-historic
when
excited
state;
or
when
and even now, suddenly and
wholly thrown out of their old grooves,
of the hand, to help the guest.
they can scarcely do
and
so.
Even some very
high races, as the French and the
seem at
in
all,
Irish,
troubled times hardly to be stable
but to be carried everywhere as the
moment and the ideas genmay determine. But, thoroughly to deal with such phenomena as these, we must examine the mode in passions of the
erated at the hour
which national characters can be emancipated from the rule of custom, and can be prepared for the use of choice.
5.
ancient customary societies the in-
THE AGE OF DISCUSSION
manner, which is a primary influence, has been settled into rules, so that it may aid established usages and not thwart them— that it may, above all, augment the habit of going by custom, and not break and weaken it. Every aid, as we have seen, was wanted to impose the yoke of custom upon such societies; and of
The
greatest living contrast
is
between
the old Eastern and customary
civili-
and the new Western and changeable civilizations. A year or two ago an inquiry was made of our most intelligent officers in the East, not as to whether the English government were really doing good in the East, but as to whether the zations
impressing the power of manner to serve
them was one
custom,
fixed
soon as that repression was
savage nature.
original
pipe are called for to welcome him; a second call for these articles announces that he may depart; but this part of the ceremony varies according to the relative rank or intimacy of the parties. These matters may appear light to those with whom observances of this character are habits, not rules; but in this country they are of primary consideration, a man's importance with himself and with others depending on them. In
by as
and when sudden choice was given. The irritability of mankind, too, is only part of their imperfect, transitory civilization and of their
you keep your distance and maintain your rank, by taking the first cup of coffee yourself, and then directing the servant, by a
fluence
life
catastrophically removed,
inferior,
a visitor arrives, the coffee
part, to the un-
in
outbreak of inherited passions long
the
the servant gives him, according to your condescending nod, the first cup of cof-
When
fre-
Such scenes of cruelty and horror as happened in the great French Revolution, and as happen, more or less, in every great riot, have always been said to bring out a secret and suppressed side of human nature; and we now see that they were
and consideration, by the mode which he is treated. If he be above you, you present these refreshments yourself, and do not partake till commanded; if equal, you exchange pipes, and present him with coffee, taking the next cup yourself; if a little below you, and you wish to pay him attention, you leave him to smoke his own pipe, but
wave
see
physiologists call
stable nature of their barbarous ancestors.
in
much
what
"atavism"— the return,
attention
if
We
communities. states
in
order
are so unstable even in
civilization
progressive
in
Persia.
fee;
we now understand why
Lastly,
and
of the greatest aids.
468
Bagehot: Physics and Politics India themselves thought
of
natives
we
place
than they ever were; but
off
make you
not
What
out.
in
question: If
away
their religion'; in a
changes
is
to
make
all
word, that
these continual
To
we
is
into
pour
whose
spirit
a civilization
progress into the form of a civilization
whose
spirit
and whether we
is fixity,
succeed or not
is
as
shall
interest.
show
Historical inquiries
ing of the Hindus
is
that the feel-
the old feeling, and
to a
time
of life
settled
political,
should
now
who obeyed
say, it
by and
all
that state
in
particular
which was
religious,
as
we
one— which those
is
in this case far
usual with him.
A
with liberty— means a
more free state,
correct
state— call
it
it
those republics.
could not have been able
analyze, for those distinctions
It
monarchy, in which the sovereign power is divided between many persons, and in which there is a discussion among those persons. Of these the Greek republics were the first in history, if not in time, and Athens was the greatest of
ancient civiliza-
a usage
is
republic or call
records go, runs back
when every important
was
social,
to
of
life
tion, so far as legal
should say, matters of principle.
in the small republics of
philosophy
Englishman is a modern feeling. "Old law rests," as Sir Henry Maine puts it, "not on contract but that the feeling of the
on status." The
question history gives a very
Greece and Italy that the chain of custom was first broken. "Liberty said, Let there be light, and, like a sunrise on the sea, Athens arose," says Shelley, and his historical
questions of political
in
this
we
was
perhaps the most interest-
ing question in an age abounding almost
beyond example
then did
clear
are attempting to
old bottles— to
how
and very remarkable answer. It is that the change from the age of status to the age of choice was first made in states where the government was to a great and a growing extent a government by discussion, and where the subjects of that discussion were in some degree abstract or,
and what they like to be, but something new and different from what they are, and what they would not like to be." In
new wine what we can of
all
But now comes the further fixity is an invariable ingredi-
others.
Indians not what they
the East, in a word,
their very
any civilization become unfixed? No doubt most civilizations stuck where they first were; no doubt we see now why stagnation is the rule of the world, and why progress is the very rare exception; but we do not learn what it is which has caused progress in these few cases, or the absence of what it is which has denied it in all
are
put
in
advantage over
ent in early civilizations,
which is always bringing something new; they do not a bit believe that the desire to make them comfortable and happy is the root of it; they believe, on the contrary, that you are aiming at something which they do not understand— that you mean to 'take
decisive
a
competitors.
comprehend a policy
the end and object of
felt to
what manner they had
structure
is
every detail being regulated by ancient
usage, they cannot
mind and language, but
be a usage of imperishall things to be kept unchanged. In former papers I have shown, or at least tried to show, why these customary civilizations were the only ones which suited an early society; why, so to say, they alone could have been first;
your constant disposition to change or, as you call it, improvement. Their own life in
their
able import, and above
they can-
still
puzzles them
in
which they
were doing good. In a majority of cases, the officers who were the best authority answered thus: "No doubt you are giving the Indians many great benefits: you give them continued peace, free trade, the right to hve as they like, subject to the laws; in these points and others they are far better
After the event
had no
it
is
easy to see
why
the teaching of history should be this and
469
Great Books Library nothing
else.
common common
It
why
easy to see
is
discussion of
common
interests should
the
become
originality
pressed
the fixed rule of
b>'
life. It
may
Mr. Grote happily
writer has well
recent
itself
said,
"Law
not
to believe as
of
as the city;
it
laid
him is
ideas the most modern, because the
all
B
then
is,
the
strange to say, a
Kelp
of
A
cannot
idea.
And
stage
that
at
of
is
still
more nugatory. Physical
as
we
conceive
thought, science,
modern
"science,"
it— that
the
is,
systematic investigation of external nature
the walls
and kindled its sacred fire." An man who wished to strike out a new path, to begin a new and important of the city,
in detail— did not
ordinary
observations
practice
man
impair, here or hereafter, the welfare of
had been delivered by the
when he
a
they believed." Toleration
notion that the bad religion of
thing venerable and unchangeable, as old
founder himself,
usually
is
let
do. His gens or his phratria required
men's minds as some-
to
form. But, as
"This
said,
what ancient times would not
have been quite so much so in ancient Greece as in some other parts of the world. But it was very much so even there. As a presented
himself the most reasonable
for
God which he can
idea of
the root
and progress. In early society, in life was forbidden and re-
of change
form
to
actions or
on
then
exist.
A
few
isolated
things— a
surface
half-
correct calendar, secrets mainb- of priestly
by himself, would have been per-
and in priestly custod\— were was then imagined; the idea of
invention,
emptorily required to abandon his novel-
all
on pain of death; he was deviating, he would be told, from the ordinances imposed by the gods on his nation, and he must not do so to please himself. On the contrary, others were deeply interested in his actions. If he disobeyed, the gods might inflict grievous harm on all the people as well as himself. Each partner in the most ancient kind of partnerships was supposed to have the power of attracting the wrath of the divinities on the entire firm, upon
using a settled study of nature as a basis
ties
the other partners quite as himself.
superstitious age isolated bold
innovations.
would soon have
man
"free
first
pated thinker
is
is
indeed
and is peculiar to a few countries even yet. In the most idea,
intellectual
intellectual
age,
Socrates,
inhabitant,
study of ph\sics because certainty
its
discouraged it
its
most the
engendered un-
and did not augment human hapof knowledge which is
The kind
piness.
most connected with human progress now was that least connected with it then. But a government by discussion, if it can be borne, at once breaks down the yoke of fixed custom. The idea of the two is inconsistent. As far as it goes, the mere
on
condition— was not
putting up of a subject to discussion, with
man was
the object of being guided by that dis-
had
required
cussion,
lived.
we now
itself
is
wish of the half-emancito use his reason on the
human destiny— to
whence he came and whither he
is
a clear admission that that sub-
no degree settled by established rule, and that men are free to choose in it. It is an admission too that there is no sacred authorit\ — no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the communit\' is bound to obey. And if a single subject or group of subject
and the "advancing hear so much. and most natural subject upon
great problems of
instruments and
intellectual city of the ancient world, in
most
progress— the de-
which human thought concerns
out
modern European
thought"
religion; the first
new
things, did not then exist. It
a
further awa>' from those times were
sciences" of which
The
new
a
an
to live as his ancestors
the
in
his
to better his
for the discovery of
upon
slain
then permitted to work;
Still
as
man in the beginning of What Macaulay so relied
as the incessant source of sire of
much
The quaking bystanders
that
jects
find
is
in
be once admitted
to discussion, ere
long the habit of discussion comes to be
goes.
470
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
charm of use and be dissolved. "Democracy," it has been said in modern times, "is hke the ^rave; it takes, but it does not give." The same is true of "discussion." Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal, and \()u can never withdraw it again; you can (
such
stablished, the sacred
wont
never again clothe
exertion
by consecration; it remains forever open to free choice and exposed to profane it
deliberation.
The only
subjects
submitted, or which
which can be
till
first
a very late age of
civilization
can be submitted, to discus-
sion in the
community
are the questions
involving the visible and pressing interests
community; they are political quesand urgent import. If a nation has in any considerable degree gained the habit, and exhibited the capacity, to discuss these questions with freedom, and to of the
tions of high
decide them with discretion, to argue
And
may
confidently be predicted for
the reason
the principles
guide
early
In
historic
men were
The
first
all
Of
In rude
who
cuted by opinion
One
pre-
is
if
the pain of a
new
founded;
was no place
ing that state; the only sufficient and ef-
ress, If,
and stayed the
gathered
onward prog-
originality of
therefore, a nation
is
mankind.
able to gain the
custom without the evil— if after it can have order and choice together— at once the fatal clog is removed, and the ordinary springs of progbenefit of
ages
it
of waiting
ress, as in
a
set out the
makes you
it
firmest
beliefs
till
now
mind
ill-
there to the
at essential
enmity. Naturally, there-
common men
original
inhabitant,
more
man who
hate a
new
idea,
and
or less to ill-treat the
brings
it.
Even
nations
with long habits of discussion are intolerant enough. In England, where there is on the whole probably a freer discussion of a greater number of subjects than ever
Discussion, too, has incentives to prog-
To
is
perse-
your favorite notions
allotted in your
startling
are disposed
ceive them, begin their elastic action.
to intelligence.
is
fore,
modern community we con-
ress peculiar to itself. It gives a
new
is
and now that it has conquered an entrance you do not at once see which of your old ideas it will or will not turn out, with which of them it can be reconciled, and with which
new and
was consecrated all
all,
certain that
is
it
the this
human nature is, as common
idea. It
may be wrong, your
For ages were
is
to
not injured by penalty.
of the greatest pains to
and compressed into a
but then that custom
anything
says
people say, so "upsetting";
spent in beginning that order and found-
custom;
bigotry places
looked on with suspicion, and
think that, after
over everything, arrested
such
all
only so learned.
is
principle.
day, anyone
it.
passionate savages, with
fectual agent in so doing
course,
societies
the greatest difficulty coerced into order state.
really
a high and great
customary
ruling
is a plain deduction from which we have found to
civilization.
of intellect.
and, as history shows,
much
on politics and not to argue iTiinously, an enormous advance in other kinds of civilization
is
it
they
that
effect
arguments are produced under conditions; the argument abstractly best is not necessarily the winning argument. PoHtical discussion must move those who have to act; it must be framed in the ideas, and be consonant with the precedent, of its time, just as it must speak its language. But within these marked conditions good discussion is better than bad; no people can for a day bear a government of discussion which does not, within the boundaries of its prejudices and its ideas, prefer good reasoning to bad reasoning, sound argument to unsound. A prize for argumentative mind is given in free states, to which no other states have anything to compare. Tolerance too is learned in discussion
with mystery, or fence
it
and
force
should determine
to
premium
was before
arguments
in
much power
required to determine political action with
471
the world,
we know how
bigotry retains. But discus-
Great Books Library be successful, requires tolerance. in a French political assembly, anyone who hears anything
sion,
the cause.
to
wherever, as
It fails
which he
howl
dislikes tries to
it
it
is
government by discus-
sion as an instrument of elevation plainly
depends— other things being equal— on the
In this
greatness or littleness of the things to be
when
great
the air," and when,
from
discussed. There are periods ideas
are
"in
are at
first
sight
from such an
manner
all
the great
influ-
The
ence as discussion, were suddenly started
their despotic customs.
onward. Macaulay would have said you might rightly read the power of discussion
North American Indian— the
"in the poetry of
which
brated,
I
have had occasion
to say so
any particular power
is
savage
become
in
cele-
if
at all, better orators
many other savages. Almost all of savages who have melted away before
much
prized
first
themselves
than
the the
Englishman were better speakers than he is. But the oratory of the savages has led to nothing, and was likely to lead to
and countries.
much
fixed
oratory of the
and yet the North American Indi-
ans were scarcely,
in
but another case of the principle of
as to the character of ages If
is,
peculiarities
the public imagination— has
and the
stately pinnacles of Burleigh." This truth,
whose
Shakespeare, in the prose
of Bacon, in the oriels of Longleat,
movements
and modern times have been nearly connected in time with government by discussion. Athens, Rome, the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, the communes and states-general of feudal Europe have all had a special and peculiar quickening influence, which they owed to their freedom, and which states without that freedom have never communicated. And it has been at the time of great epochs of thought— at the Peloponnesian War, at the fall of the Roman Republic, at the Reformation, at the French Revolution—that such liberty of speaking and thinking have produced their full effect. It is on this account that the discussions of savage tribes have produced so little effect in emancipating those tribes from of thought in ancient
some cause or other, even common persons seem to partake of an unusual elevation. The age of Elizabeth in England was conspicuously such a time. The new idea of the Reformation in religion, and the enlargement of the moenia mtindi by the discovery of new and singular lands, taken together, gave an impulse to thought which few, if any, ages can equal. The discussion, though not wholly free, was yet far freer than in the average of ages and countries. Accordingly, every pursuit seemed to start forward. Poetry, science, and architecture, different as they are, and removed as they all
sci-
cared; and
began a reform in philosophy to which all were then opposed. In a word, the temper of the age encouraged originality, and in consequence original men started into prominence, went hither and thither where they liked, arrived at goals which the age never expected, and so made it ever memorable.
capable of practicing with equaof a
men
almost
nimity continuous tolerance.
The power
penetrated into physical
it
down.
If we know that a nation is capable of enduring continuous discussion, we know
that
It
ence, for which very few
in
an age, those possessed of that power will
be imitated; those deficient in that power will be despised. In consequence an unusual quantity of that power will be developed, and be conspicuous. Within certain limits vigorous and elevated thought was respected in Elizabeth's time, and, therefore, vigorous and elevated thinkers were many; and the effect went far beyond
nothing.
It is
a discussion not of principles,
but of undertakings; expedition
A
will
its
topics are
whether
answer, and should be
undertaken; whether expedition B will not answer, and should
not be undertaken; whether village A is the best village to plunder, or whether village B is a better. Such discussions augment the vigor of
472
j
;
I
'
I
I
Bagehot: Physics and Politics the analogy of
encourage a debating facility, and develop those gifts of demeanor and of gesture which excite the confidence of the hearers. But they do not excite the speculative intellect, do not lead men to language,
what he read. Just as in every country Europe in 1793 there were two factions, one of the old-world aristocracy, and the of
of
other of the incoming democracy, just so
argue speculative doctrines, or to question ancient principles. They, in
what he saw helped him by
a telling object lesson to the understanding
some material
there
improve the sheep within the but they do not help them or incline
was
every city of ancient Greece,
in
the year 400 B.C., one party of the
many
respects,
in
fold;
and another of the few. This Mr. Mitford perceived, and being a strong aristocrat, he wrote a "history," which is little except a party pamphlet, and which, it must be said, is even now readable on that very account. The vigor of passion with which it was written puts life into the words, and retains the attention of the reader. And that is not all. Mr. Grote, the great scholar whom we have had lately to mourn, also recognizing the identity between the struggles of Athens and Sparta and the struggles of our modern world, and taking violently
them to leap out of the fold. The next question, therefore, is: Why did discussions in some cases relate to prolific ideas, and why did discussions in other cases relate only to isolated transactions? is
The
reply which history suggests
very clear and very remarkable.
races of
men
at
Some
our earliest knowledge of
them have already acquired the basis of a constitution; they have already the rudiments of a complex polity— a monarch, a senate, and a general meeting of citizens. The Greeks were one of those races, and it happened, as was natural, that there was in process of time a struggle, the earliest that we know of, between the
free
aristocratic
party,
the contrary side to that of Mitford, being
was an wrote a reply, far above Mitford's history in power and learning, but being in its main characteristic almost aristocrat,
represented
originally
great a democrat as Mitford
as
by the senate, and the popular party, represented by the "general meeting." This is plainly a question of principle, and its
vigorous political passion, written for per-
being so has led to
almost
its
identical— being above
who
sons
history being written
all
more than two thousand years afterwards
must
remarkable manner. Some seventy years ago an English country gentleman named Mitford, who, like so
scholarship
in
a
many
very
of his age,
aristocratic
had been
opinions by the
ars.
reflex
of his
own
time.
Thucydides, and there he saw, as
of
to see this; at least,
many
modem
little
idea of
it
either,
if
as
not exclusively, for schol-
was the same in ancient as in The whole customary ways thought were at once shaken by it, and times.
shaken not only
in the closets of philoso-
common
thought and men. The "liberation of humanity," as Goethe used to call it— the deliverance of men from the yoke of inherited usage, and of rigid, unquestionable law— was begun in Greece, and had many of its greatest effects, good and evil, on Greece. It is just because of the analogy between the controversies of that time and those of our times that somedaily business of ordinary
a
histories of
Greece before Mitford had but the vaguest idea of it; and, not being a man of supreme originality, he would doubtless have had very
not,
the effect of fundamental political
phers but in the
and the stmggles of some freshness of mind it had been hidden for
centuries. All the
And
his
mirror, the progress his age. It required
and
antiquity are and
book of a man who cares for more than for anything else,
the
in
politics
of
discussion
Revolution, suddenly found that the his-
War was He took up
things a book of
be, the
modem
French
tory of the Peloponnesian
for
histories
written mainly,
terrified into first
care
all
except that
473
Great Books Library one has of
said, "Classical history
modem
history;
only which
is
it
is
page of Aristotle and Plato bears ample and indelible trace of the age of discussion in which they lived; and thought cannot possibly be freer. The deliverance of the speculative intellect from traditional and customary authority was altogether
a part
is
medieval history
ancient."
had been no discussion of principle in Greece, probably she would still have produced works of art. Homer contains no such discussion. The speeches in the Iliad, which Mr. Gladstone, the most competent of living judges, maintains to be the finest ever composed by man, are not discussions of principle. There is no more tendency in them to critical disquisition than there is to political economy. In Herodotus you have the beginning of the If
there
age of discussion.
He
No doubt
is
going out.
I
to
a very
tion of
it.
ancient Athens,
only went
way among
the popula-
little
Two
great classes of the people,
women, were almost excluded from such qualities; even the free population doubtless contained a far the slaves and
He
greater proportion of very ignorant and very superstitious persons than we are in
book many incipient
We fix our attenon the best specimens of Athenian culture— on the books which have descended to us— and we forget that the
The
corporate action of the Athenian people
nance and fixed religion. Still, in his travels through Greece, he must have heard endless political arguments; and accordingly find in his
ascribe
down
with reverence to established ordi-
you can
the "detachment" from prejand the subjection to reason, which
udice,
belongs in his es-
sence to the age which refers
complete.
traces of abstract political disquisition.
the habit of imagining.
tion
discourses on democracy, aristocracy, and
at various critical junctures exhibited the
monarchy, which he puts into the mouth
most gross
of the Persian conspirators
when
mon-
the
thought of such things. You might as well imagine Saul or David speaking them as those to whom Herodotus attributes them.
They
are Greek speeches, full of free Greek discussion, and suggested by the
Greeks
already
considerable,
of
that respect satisfied.
the
It may be said much weight to the
The
the results of discussion.
in
and even Herodotus, the least of a wrangler of any man, and the most of a sweet and simple age
of
debate
is
beginning,
narrator, felt the effect.
When we come
have ever been;
his light
in
to
reads times
a
like
speech, it
speech,
or
materials
is
for
Of
human
contains
the
well;
that
as
was progress
in
And unques-
was progress— but
except religion and omit also
it
all
was
we
that the
Jews had learned from foreigners, it may be doubted if there be much else new between the time of Samuel and that of
Thncydides
the Athenian Assembly.
in
there
giving too
only progress upon a single subject. If
usage. As Grote's history often reads like a report to Parliament, so half
am
I
as well as in Athens.
tionably
is
and purged from consecrated
habit,
a certain sense there
Judea
pure, "dry light," free from the "humors" of
that
classical idea of
development; that history record of another progress
Thncydides, the results of discussion are as full as they
as far as the
Still,
and cultivated part of society is concerned, the triumph of reason was complete; the minds of the highest philosophers were then as ready to obey evidence and reason as they have ever been since; probably they were more ready. The rule of custom over them at least had been wholly broken, and the primary conditions of intellectual progress were in
archy was vacant, have justly been called absurd, as speeches supposed to have been spoken by those persons. No Asian ever
experience,
superstition.
intellectual
a
Malachi.
later
In
but without
unnecessary to speak. Every
474
there was progress, was not any. This was
religion it
there
Bagehot: Physics and Politics due
to the cause of that progress. All over
and over other of the world which preserve more or
antiquity, all over the East,
parts
do not for a moment pretend that I can explain— is that the prophetic revelations are, taken as a whole, indisputably im-
classes of religious teachers— one,
provements; that they contain, as time goes on, at each succeeding epoch, higher and
the priest, the inheritor of past accredited
better views of religion. But the peculiarity
less
are
nearly their ancient condition, there
two
the
inspiration;
possessor
of
a
other, like
the
prophet,
present
the
Curtius describes the distinction well in relation to the condition of
which history
first
is
not to
my
Greece with
present purpose.
My
point
is
no such spreading impetus in progress thus caused as there is in progress caused by discussion. To receive that there
inspiration.
is
a particular conclusion upon the ipse dixit, upon the accepted authority of an ad-
presents us:
The mantic
art is an institution totally from the priesthood. It is based on the belief that the gods are in constant proximity to men, and in their government of the world, which comprehends every thing both great and
intellect
small, will not disdain to manifest their
that ancient code of authoritative usage.
nay, it seems necessary that, whenever any hitch has arisen in the moral system of the human world, this should also manifest itself by some sign in the world of nature, if only mortals are able to understand and avail themselves of these divine hints. For this a special capacity is requisite; not a capacity which can be learnt like a human art or science, but rather a peculiar state of grace in the case of
On the contrary, the two combined. In each generation the conservative influence
different
will;
single
individuals
and
single
families
ears and eyes are opened to the divine revelations, and who participate in
largely than the rest of
the divine
their office
spirit.
and
it
argue out conclusions for
to
as
yourself. Accordingly the religious progress
caused by the prophets did not break
down
"built the sepulchers" and accepted the teaching of past prophets, even while it
was slaying and persecuting those who were living. But discussion and custom cannot be thus combined; their "method,"
modern philosophers would
as
say,
is
an-
tagonistic. Accordingly, the progress of the classical
the
Accordingly
obviously not so vivify-
is
states
gradually
awakened the
fore in a history of intellectual progress,
mankind
calling to assert
instructor,
whole intellect; that of Judea was partial, and improved religion only. And there-
whose
more
mired
ing to the argumentative and questioning
classical
the
fills
is
superior
Jewish the inferior place; just
them-
and the as,
in
a
selves as organs of the divine will; they
special history of theology only, the places
are justified in opposing their authority
of the
to every
power
of the world.
On
two might be interchanged. experiment has been tried on the same subject matter. The characteristic of the Middle Ages may be approximately— though only approximately
A
this
head
conflicts were unavoidable, and the reminiscences living in the Greek people, of the agency of a Tiresias and Calchas, prove how the Heroic kings experienced not only support and aid, but also opposition and violent protests,
from the mouths of the
men
second
—described
as a return to the period of au-
thoritative usage
and
self-choosing thought. In Judea there position
as
was exactly the same op-
elsewhere.
All
that
is
as
an abandonment
of the classical habit of independent
of prophecy.
stant
new
mean
of the
comes from the prophets; all which is old is retained by the priests. But the peculiarity of Judea— a peculiarity which I
can
I
that this
is
I
how
and
for an in-
an exact description
main medieval discuss
do not
characteristic;
nor
far that characteristic
was an advance upon those of previous times;
475
its
friends say
it is
far better than the
Great Books Library peculiarities of the classical period;
its
England
ene-
But both friends and enemies will admit that the most marked feature of the Middle Ages may roughly be described as I have described it. And my point is that just as this medimies that
it
is
far worse.
was
eval characteristic
was
been a conviction, more or less rooted, that a man may by an intellectual process think out a religion for himself, and that, as the highest of all duties, he ought to do so.
that of a return to
The
had marked the pre-Athenian times, so it was dissolved much in the same manner as the influence of Athens, and other influences like it, claim to have dissolved that
up the
principal agent in breaking
so fixed
seemed
that they
forever, or
till
some
which were to last
likely
historical catastrophe is
containing,
like
and
a
the
classical,
popular
a
king,
assembly;
claim
with
to
The
much
possess
a
and,
to to
its its
structure
is
But
in
much
in
it
and
in
obviously a
men among to
own
aborigines
it
commonly
be
over-strict
elements.
They
and "adopt" useful bands and useful men, though their ancestral customs may not be identicalnay, though they may be, in fact, opposite to their own. In modern Europe, the existence of a cosmopolite Church, claiming to be above nations and really extending through nations, and the scattered remains of Roman law and Roman civilization are obliged to coalesce with
co-operated with the liberating influence of political discussion.
And
so did other
causes also. But perhaps in no case have these
as
so far as
of Europe,
co-operated
is
and usages, and
in the choice of their
subsidiary causes
alone been able
to
generate intellectual freedom; certainly
in
all
the most remarkable cases the in-
fluence of discussion has presided at the
true effects, have mainly trained the
trained.
settles
compels the colonists not
the controversies as
English political intellect,
it
of alien race
antiquarian
and the controversies
Trade, for example,
it.
influence:
stitution, as far as the
it,
ancient and in
in
forces
which has done much to bring men of different customs and different beliefs into close contiguity, and has thus aided to change the customs and the beliefs of them all. Colonization is another such
history of the English
discussions within
Both
force
Conworld cares for it, is, in fact, the complex history of the popular element in this ancient polity, which was sometimes weaker and sometimes stronger, but which has never died out, has commonly possessed great though varying power, and is now entirely predominant. The history of this growth is the history of the English people; and the discussions about this constitution and the learning.
vast effect.
modern times other
wherever they went, they carried these elements and varied them, as force compelled or circumstances required. As far as England is concerned, the excellent dissertations of Mr. Freeman and Mr. Stubbs have proved this in the amplest manner, and brought it home to persons who cannot
not the only force which has produced
this
their ancient dwelling-place a polity
council,
true that the influence of discussion
It is
overwhelmed them, was the popular element in the ancient polity which was everywhere diffused in the Middle Ages. The Germanic tribes brought with them from
influence of the political discussion,
and the influence of the religious discussion, have been so long and so firmly combined, and have so effectually enforced one another, that the old notions of loyalty and fealty and authority, as they existed in the Middle Ages, have now over the best minds almost no effect.
customary epoch.
The
been very different from what it has been an influence
in antiquity. It
of discussion. Since Luther's time there has
the essence of the customary epoch which
persistent medieval customs,
particularly, the influence of re-
ligion has
creation active
476
of that
freedom, and has been
and dominant
in
it.
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
No doubt apparent cases of may easily be found. It may be in
the court of Augustus there
general
intellectual
freedom,
time government by discussion has been a principal organ for improving mankind, yet, from its origin, it is a plant of singular delicacy. At first the chances are
exception
latest
said that
was much an
almost
much
detachment from ancient prejudice, but that there was no free political discussion at all. But, then, the ornaments of that time were derived from a time of great freedom: it was the republic which trained the men whom the empire ruled. The close congregation of most miscellaneous elements under the empire was, no doubt, of itself unfavorable to inherited prejudice, and favorable to intellectual entire
Church, which
is
in
beginning,
of
it
requires that discus-
early time,
to those
when
mem-
writing
is
who are to be guided by the discussion must hear it with their own ears, must be brought face to face with the orator, and must feel his influence for themselves. The first free states were little towns, smaller than any political division which we now have, except the republic of Andorra, which is a sort of vestige of them. It is in the market place undiscovered, those
little
of the country town, as
we
now
should
and in petty matters concerning the market town, that discussion began, and thither all the long train of its consequences may be traced back. Some historispeak,
can hardly look such a place without some sentimental musing, poor and trivial as the thing cal inquirers, like myself, at
But such small towns are very
seems.
Numbers
feeble.
the latest, are a
in the earliest wars, as in
main source
And
in
very
common and
of victory.
early times one kind of state is
great
populations,
is
exceedingly numer-
ous. In every quarter of the globe
we
compacted by
find
tradi-
tional custom and consecrated sentiment which are ruled by some soldier— generally some soldier of a foreign tribe, who has conquered them and, as it has been said, "vaulted on the back" of them, or whose ancestors have done so. These great populations, ruled by a single will, have doubtless trodden down and destroyed innumerable little cities that were just
affect political action. The despotism "tempered by epigram" was a government which permitted argument of licentious freedom within changing limits, and which was ruled by that argument spasmodically and practically, though not in name or
beginning their freedom. In this
way
the Greek cities in Asia were
and so ought the cities of Greece proper to have been subjected also. Every schoolboy must subjected to the Persian power,
consistently. in
living. In the
free state are of necessity
reading rare, and representation
difficult,
was added to what the republic left! The power of free interchange of ideas being wanting, the ideas themselves were barren. Also, no doubt, much intellectual freedom may emanate from countries of free political discussion, and penetrate to countries where that discussion is limited. Thus the intellectual freedom of France in the eighteenth century was in great part owing to the proximity of and incessant intercourse with England and Holland. \^oltaire resided among us; and every page of the Esjmt des Lois proves how much Montesquieu learned from living here. But, of course, it was only part of the French culture which was so derived: the germ might be foreign, but the tissue was native. And very naturally, for it would be absurd to call the ancien regime a government without discussion: discussion abounded there— only, by reason of the bad form of the government, it was never sure with ease and certainty to
But though
But
bers.
a peculiar subject that
how
its
be brought home
sion shall
exertion. Yet, except in the instance of the
requires a separate discussion,
against
members of a few. The essence the
the earliest and in the
477
Great Books Library
On
have felt that nothing but amazing folly and unmatched mismanagement saved Greece from conquest both in the time of Xerxes and in that of Darius. The fortunes of intellectual civilization were then at the mercy of what seems an insignificant probability. If the Persian leaders had only shown that decent skill and ordinary military prudence which it was likely they would show, Grecian freedom would have been at an end. Athens, like so many Ionian cities on the other side of the Aegean, would have been absorbed into a great despotism;
we
all
we now remember
this
account such states are ver>
rare in history.
Upon
the first view of the might even be set up
facts a speculation
were peculiar to a particular race. most important free institutions, and the only ones which have left living
that they
By
far the
representatives in the world, are the
spring either of the
the classical nations or of the tutions of the
Germanic
her
classical nations
wars of Rome are with cities like Rome— about equal in size, though inferior in
Aryan race certainly eastern Aryans— those,
should not remember, for
valor.
it
this
it.
In the
of
constitution,
size
great
without a sign long
and
The
small
slight strength of early free states
made them always
liable
to
easy
de-
struction.
And
their internal frailty
As soon
is
even greater.
men
break forth; even
all
is
for
the so-called free.
The
example,
who
not
We know that it was government in which many proposers took part, and under which discussion was constant, active, and conclusive. No doubt our present purpose.
as discussion begins the savage
propensities of
place,
mankind. To offer the Bengalese a free and to expect them to work one, would be the maximum of human folly. There then must be something else besides Aryan descent which is necessary to fit men for discussion and train them for liberty; and, what is worse for the argument we are opposing, some nonAryan races have been capable of freedom. Carthage, for example, was a Semitic republic. We do not know all the details of its constitution, but we know enough for
She beenough to beat them before she advanced far enough to contend with them. But such great good fortune was and must be rare. Unnumbered little cities which might have rivaled Rome or Athens
came
perished
first
speak languages derived from the Sanskrit —are amongst the most slavish divisions
herself against Asian despotisms.
before history was imagined.
belong to what ethnolo-
Aryan
easy theory the facts are inconsistent
with
Italy that she
doubtless
consti-
race. Plausibly it might be argued that the power of forming free states was superior in and peculiar to that family of mankind. But unfortunately for gists call the
was only when she had conbegan to measure
It
quered
first
nations. All living
freedom runs back to them, and those truths which at first sight would seem the whole of historical freedom can be traced to them. And both the Germanic and the
would never have occurred. Her citizens might have been ingenious, and imitative, and clever; they could not certainly have been free and original. Rome was preserved from subjection to a great empire by her fortunate distance from one. The early for
off-
constitutions of
first
a
in
modern communities, where those propensities, too, have been weakened by ages of culture, and repressed by ages of
Tyre,
the
parent city of Garthage, the
obedience, as soon as a vital topic for dis-
other colonies of Tyre besides Carthage,
well started the keenest and most
Carthage were all as have thus a whole group of ancient republics of non-Aryan race, and one which, being more ancient than the classical republics, could not have
cussion violent
is
passions
and the colonies
free as Carthage.
break forth. Easily de-
stroyed as are early free states by forces
from without, they are even more to destruction by forces from within.
liable
478
of
We
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
I
}
borrowed from or imitated them. So that the theory which would make government by discussion the exclusive patrimony of a single race of mankind is on the face of
am
a
mankind were,
went on suggested discussions of principle, and why the great majority of mankind had nothing like it. This is almost as hopeless as asking why Milton was a genius and why Bacon was a philosopher. Indeed it is the same, because the causes which give
the
fact
in
to
same.
show
I
have,
that a
first compact and sacred group— the number of parties to a discussion was at first augmented very slowly. Thirdly, the number of "open" subjects, as we should say nowadays— that is, of subjects on which public opinion was optional, and on which discussion was admitted— was at first very small. Custom ruled everything originally, and the area of free argument was en-
to
of
and once strongly preferred by it, be fixed on it and to be permanent in it, from causes which were stated. Granted the beginning of the type, we may, I think, explain its development and nation,
likely to
aggravation; but explain
why
we
larged but very slowly. If that
if
I
may
influ-
ence; they are one factor in the cause, but
they are not the only factor; for
most dissimilar races of
men
we
tions
living in the
The cause
I
am
at all right,
be enlarged thus
pletely solve the question
find
why some
na-
have the polity and some not; on
the contrary, they plainly leave a large "re-
same climate and affected by the same surroundings, and we have every reason to believe that those unlike races have so lived as neighbors for ages.
only
custom was in early days the society, and if you suddenly questioned such custom you would destroy society. But though the existence of these conditions may be traced historically, and though the reason of them may be explained philosophically, they do not com-
so say, in
have unquestionably much
could
slowly, for
one place rather than in another. Climate and "physical" surroundings, in the largest sense,
area
cement of
cannot in the least
the incipient type of curious
characters broke out,
and then
include circumjacent outsiders, as well as
individual character once originating in a
is
into nations,
the
en-
indeed,
marked type
and of clans
again by the widening of nations, so as to
similar varieties of national character, are
deavored
traced only through the mother,
the aggregation of families into clans or gentes,
birth to the startling varieties of individual
and those which give birth
is
and while the family is therefore a vague entity, no progress to a high polity is possible. Secondly, that polity would seem to have been created very gradually; by
them, possessed of a polity which as time
character,
so
distinctness
scent
minimum we know of
very small
as long as
some form
life
with any simple cannot profess to explain
why
completely of
I
to progress. First,
marked as to give family and precision, and to make a home education and a home discipline probable and possible. While dein
not prepared
counter-theory.
and so leads
the nation must possess the patria potestas
untenable.
it
I
discussion,
phenomenon" unknown.
sidual
unexplained
and
of II
types must be something outside the tribe
on
something within— something by the tribe. But what that something is I do not know that anyone
this manner politics or discussion broke up the old bonds of custom which were now strangling mankind, though they had
can
once aided and helped it. But this is only one of the many gifts which those polities have conferred, are conferring, and will confer on mankind. I am not going to write
acting
In
inherited
in the least explain.
The following
conditions may,
I
think,
be historically traced to the nation capable of a polity
which suggests principles
for
479
Great Books Library a eiilogium on liberty, but
down
I
wish
to set
three points which have not been
human
at
suited
all
nature
human
early times of the
pulse to action. are then plain
even
man who
man who
later
the
is
ships, our colonies, our
makes modern life modern life, could not have existed. Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required before that noisy existence began, and without those pale preliminary students it never could have been brought into being. And nine-
catches the most fishthe
quickest to
kill its
the
enemies,
which kills most of its enemies, is the nation which succeeds. All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on
man who
dom
pauses; the traditional wis-
of those times
was never weary
inculcating that "delays
of
and that the sluggish man— the man "who roasteth not that which he took in hunting" —will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will
very soon perish out of
consequence an
it.
And
of
spect
the
And
such.
in
is one of the mankind.
irritable desire to act directly,
tion of
was.
a room"; 12 ^^d, though
that length,
it
is
I
certain that
to
life
to
act.
The
rise
if
anyone could be
the conclusion
is
plain that
if
It
proved science ages before there
was the
irritable activity, the
"wish
be doing something," that prevented
it.
things;
and, even worse, with their idle clamor they "disturbed the brooding hen";
should
let those be quiet who wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might have come
they would not
forth.
of physical science, the
body of practical truth provable to all men, exemplifies this in the plainest way. If it had not been for quiet people, who sat still and studied the sections of the cone; if other quiet people had not sat still and studied the theory of infinitesi-
If
we
consider
how much
science has
done and how much it is doing for mankind, and if the over-activity of men is proved to be the cause why science came so late into the world, and is so small and scanty still, that will convince most people that our over-activity
GBWW,
re-
we
great
12 Peusees, 139;
this
do not go
sit still
have been a far wiser race than we are if we had been readier to sit quiet— we should have known much better the way in which it was best to act when we came first
in
Most men inherited a nature too eager and too restless to be quiet and find out
arose from "man's being unable to in
is
the
is
had been more such people, if the world had not laughed at those there were, if rather it had encouraged them— then there would have been a great accumula-
most conspicuous
Pascal said that most of the evils of
it
there
inability to stay quiet, an
failings of
same:
lieved to be useless,
dangerous,"
are
modern science
tenths
produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers; who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them; who, as the proverb went, "walked into a well from looking at the stars"; who were be-
or
the
"idle stargazers"
if
and without our astronomy "our seamen," all which
possible,
the most
man who tends man who tills man who succeeds;
pursuits;
motions of the heavenly bodies— then our
the im-
or the
largest field— is the
nation which
kills
human
all
modern astronomy would have been im-
the
the
on,
largest herds,
is
the
had not watched long and carefully the
The problems before men and simple. The man who
works hardest, the deer, the
races
in
of
of
circumstances.
civilized
to
main and principal excellence
sat
doctrine
out
chances, the most "dreamy moonshine," as the purely practical mind would consider,
which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not
A
had not
worked
and
still
sufficiently noticed.
Civilized ages inherit the
mals, or other quiet people
evil.
Vol. 33, p. 196b.
480
But
this
is
is
a very great
only part, and perhaps not
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
harm
the greatest part, of the
As
does.
activity
were
i
B
human
race
kills is
A
A, then
A
survives,
a race of A's.
of life are plain
in-
is
it
hfe was simple, and quick action gen-
plain,
erally led to desirable ends. If
before
good over evil is in favor of benevolence; one can hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain that there is a most heavy debit of evil, and that this burden might almost all have been spared
of
that over-
said,
when
herited from times objects
have
I
kills
B
and the
But the
no longer. To act
as
well
as
had not inherited from
their
barbarous
us
issues
philanthropists
if
forefathers
rightly
wild
a
passion
others
instant
for
f
\
in
modem
society requires
action.
a great deal
I
of previous study, a great deal of assimi-
i
lated information, a great deal of sharp-
Even in commerce, which is now the main occupation of mankind, and one in which there is a ready test of success and failure wanting in many higher pursuits, the same disposition to excessive action
ened imagination; and these prerequisites of sound action require much time, and, I
was going
much
to say,
"lying in the
very apparent to careful observers. Part
sun," a long period of "mere passiveness."
is
Even the
of every
one another, which at first particularly trained men to be quick, now requires them to be slow. A art of killing
hasty general
adays; the best
is
who who
any
passive
is is
if
"silent in
possesses
a sort of
man
Moltke,
seven languages,"
more and
who
better accumulated in-
who
people than anyone
way
plays
but then
it
with their
a restrained
it
multiplies so
open
it
brings to
than they
capital will only
occupy
and to be industrious for eight hours, and so they are ruined. If they could only have sat idle the other four hours, they would have been rich men. The amusements of mankind, at least of the English part of mankind, teach the same lesson.
active
Our
shooting, our hunting, our traveling,
our climbing have become laborious pursuits.
much
It is
common
a
saying abroad that
"an Englishman's notion of a holiday
such great populations to suffer and to be vicious, that it suffering,
own
men
gratifying. Operations
four hours of the day, and they wish to be
also does great evil. It augvice,
of business for
sufficient,
have the means of
of chess with his
ments so much
is
pensity to action in such
of killing
ever lived. This
and considerate enemy. I wish the art of benefiting men had kept pace with the art of destroying them; for, though war has become slow, philanthropy has remained hasty. The most melancholy of human reflections perhaps is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does,
game
caused by the impossi-
which their and in which they can engage safely. In some degree, of course, this is caused by the wish to get rich; but in a considerable degree, too, by the mere love of activity. There is a greater procapital
ever was passive,
formation as to the best
man
Von
is
people to confine themselves
amount
to the
the worst of generals now-
is
mania
bility to get
fatiguing journey";
life
other
way
of
and
saying that
is
a
is
only an-
the
immense
this
argument whether it be or be not an evil to the world, and this is en-
energy and activity which have given us
because excellent people fancy that they can do much by rapid action— that they will most benefit the world when they most relieve their own feelings; that
descended
is
to
soon as an evil is seen "something" ought to be done to stay and prevent it. incline to
to
those
modern life tivity, and of venting that energy. Even the abstract speculations of mankind bear conspicuous traces of the same
as
One may
many cases who do not find in any mode of using that ac-
our place in the world have in
tirely
excessive impulse. Every sort of philosophy
hope that the balance
has been systematized; and yet, as these
481
Great Books Library contradict
one
an-
most of them cannot be
true.
Un-
philosophies other,
utterly
But
make
number
of
Each kind of persons will spokesman; each spokesman will his characteristic objection, and each his characteristic counter-proposition, and so in the end nothing will probably be done, or at least only the minimum which have have
is
their
plainly urgent. In
may be
many cases this many cases
dangerous; in
A
action will be preferable.
Macaulay well
says,
delay
quick
campaign, as
cannot be directed by
a "debating society"; and
many
other kinds
and absolute general. But for the purpose now in hand —that of preventing hasty action, and ensuring elaborate consideration— there is no of action also require a single
device like a polity of discussion.
The enemies
the old systems of thought are not
new
considerable
a
till
almost nothing, will be done with exces-
worked into big systems what should have been left as little suggestions. the
a condition that the action shall
sive rapidity.
word, the superfluous energy of mankind has flowed over into philosophy, and has
is
has govern-
almost infallible security that nothing, or
and error, and therefore that not be worth while to spend life in
true as systems, neither
What to
have talked over it, and have agreed on it. If those persons be people of different temperaments, diff^erent ideas, and different educations, you have an
reasoning over their consequences? In a
If
said:
discussion
persons
that they will contain a strange mix-
will
it
not begin
ture of truth it
by
do with these things? Will it prevent them, or even mitigate them? It can and does do both in the very plainest way. If you want to stop instant and immediate action, always
proved abstract principles without number have been eagerly caught up by sanguine men, and then carefully spun out into books and theories, which were to explain the whole world. But the world goes clear against these abstractions, and it must do so, as they require it to go in antagonistic directions. The mass of a system attracts the young and impresses the unwary; but cultivated people are very dubious about it. They are ready to receive hints and suggestions, and the smallest real truth is ever welcome. But a large book of deductive philosophy is much to be suspected. No doubt the deductions may be right; in most writers they are so; but where did the premises come from? Who is sure that they are the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, of the matter in hand? Who is not almost sure before-
hand
be
will
it
ment
who want
revolt
of this object— the people
to act
They
quickly— see
this
very dis-
from them to be trusted in its whole vigor. There is the same original vice in that also. There is an excessive energy in revolutions if there is such energy anywhere. The passion for action is quite as ready to pull down as to build up; probably it is more
tinctly.
ready, for the task
they add up the hours that are consumed
is
the
evaporates in
parliamentary after
And
still
But
this
is
it
It will
true,
exactly
not "consider
it
government;
they
call
is it,
Mr. Carlyle, the "national palaver";
it,
Cromwell— that
lute
what the human mind
somehow
all
Their great enemy
is, when an eager, absoman might do exactly what other eager men wished, and do it immediately.
a
again.
will not do. It will act
talk.
it,
awhile the old thought retain,
yet consider
age of committees,"
"an
and the speeches which are made in and they sigh for a time when England might again be ruled, as it once was, by in
Ah,
is
that the committees do nothing, that
easier.
Old things need not be therefore O brother men, nor yet the new;
present
are forever explaining that
All
these
invectives
are
perpetual
and
many-sided; they come from philosophers, each of whom wants some new scheme
at once.
again."
482
i
I
Bagehot: Physics and Politics tried;
from philanthropists, who want some from revolutionists, who want some old institution destroyed; from "new
ideas got possession of
evil abated;
ties,
who want their new era started forthwith. And they all are distinct ad-
ideas
is
human nature— to
of
desire
to
promptly, which in a simple age excellent, but
which
much
time leads to so
The same
in a later
is
act so
I
fear they are. is
Still,
what
this
ought
it
trend
is
at least, to
to be.
And
I
di-
England
seem
is
and it is
and
it
is
to the incessant
successful races, other things being equal,
intellectual
which multiply the fastest. In the mankind numbers have ever been a great power. The more numerous group has always had an advantage over the less numerous, and the fastest-breeding group has always tended to be the most are those
conflicts
why our much less than those of our fathers. When we have a definite end in view, which we know we want, and which we think we know how to obtain, we This
are beginning to see this,
ernment requiring constant debates, written and oral. This is one of the unrecognized benefits of free government, one of the modes in which it counteracts the excessive inherited impulses of humanity. There is another also for which it does the same, but which I can only touch delicately, and which at first sight will seem ridiculous. The most
weigh evidence, a conviction that much may be said on every side of everything which the elder and more fanatic ages of the world lacked.
We
doubts are due; and much of that discussion is due to the long existence of a gov-
tone, a diffused disposition to
energies
per-
are railed at for so beginning. But
a great benefit,
our government by discussion,
which has fostered a general
we now
prevalence of detective discussion that our
believe that
in great part due, in
on
opinions
knew anything. It might be well if number of effectual demonstraexisted among mankind; but while
creed.
we
certainly,
somewhat
neither,
men have
of
for
of inevitable doubt. Let us not be bigots with a doubt, and persecutors without a
minished, though only by a small fraction of
which
set
set
cient, let us recognize the plain position
not
much
subjects of
tions
only that committees and do not act with rapid decisiveness, but that no one now so acts. And I hope that in fact this is true, for, according to me, it proves that the hereditary barbaric impulse is decaying and dying out. So far from thinking the quality attributed to us a defect, I wish that those who complain of it were far more right
than
one
no such demonstrations exist, and while the evidence which completely convinces one man seems to another trifling and insuffi-
age
parliaments
eager and violent action
often
another
a greater
sometimes takes a more general form. It is alleged that our energies are diminishing; that ordinary and average men have not the quick determination nowadays which they used to have when the world was younger;
how
persecuted ceive,
and complex
against our
how incomplete these old how almost by chance one
see
were;
other;
evil.
accusation
men and communinow possible no
happily
is
seized on one nation, and another on an-
the
greatest hindrance to the inherited mistake
the
this
We
longer.
eraists,"
missions that a polity of discussion
but
the real reason
so
of
numerous. In consequence,
human
nature
has descended into a comparatively uncontentious civilization with a desire far
can act well enough. The campaigns of our
in excess of
any campaigns ever were; the speculations of our merchants have greater promptitude, greater audacity, greater vigor than any such speculations ever had before. In old times a few
want," as political economists would say,
soldiers are as energetic as
what
is
needed; with a
"felt
altogether greater than the "real want."
A
walk
in
London is all that "The great
to establish this. cities"
483
is
one vast
evil
is
necessary
sin of great
consequent upon
it.
Great Books Library
And who
is
reckon up
to
how much
these
ety,
how many
thoughtful
structure
struggle for existence in societies ever
growing more crowded and more commust have for its concomitant
plicated,
an increase of the great nervous centres mass, in complexity, in activity. The larger body of emotion needed as a fountain of energy for men who have to hold their places and rear their families under the intensifying competition of social life, is, other things equal, the in
imaginations
which might have left something to mankind are debased to mean cares, how much
how
little
does any of them
make
regulation which, in a better society, can alone enable the individual to leave a persistent posterity, are, other things equal, the correlatives of a more complex brain; as are also those more
of
comparison with what might be? Irelands have there been in the world where men would have been contented and happy if they had only been itself in
And how many
fewer;
how many more
there have been
if
Irelands
numerous, more varied, more general, and more abstract ideas, which must also
would
become
the intrusive numbers
the genesis of this larger quantity of and thought in a brain thus
augmented
human
it
was
will
be said of
size
and developed
in
is,
terials to repair
it.
So that both
inal cost of construction
and
in orig-
in subse-
quent cost of working, the nervous system must become a heavier tax on the organism. Already the brain of the
elder and the fewer.
it
in
other things equal, the correlative of a greater wear of nervous tissue and greater consumption of mastructure,
They have enabled more people to exist, but these people work just as hard and are just as mean and miserable as the But
life
feeling
being."
as
increasingly requisite for sucas society advances. And
cessful
had not been kept down by infanticide and vice and misery? How painful is the conclusion that it is dubious whether all the machines and inventions of mankind "have yet lightened the day's labor of a
Those higher by the better self-
correlative of larger brain. feelings presupposed
every successive generation sacrifices to the next,
and more especially in nervous and function. The peaceful
tion;
words mean? How many spoiled Hves, how many broken hearts, how many wasted bodies, how many ruined minds, how much misery pretending to be gay, how much gaiety feehng itself to be miserable, how much after mental pain, how much eating and transmitted disease? And in the moral part of the world, how many minds are racked by incessant anxi-
this passion just
man is larger by nearly thirty per cent than the brain of the savage. Already, too, it presents an increased heterogeneity— especially in the distribucivilised
said of the passion of activity.
Granted that it is in excess, how can you say, how on earth can anyone say, that government by discussion can in any way cure or diminish it? Cure this evil: that government certainly will not; but tend to diminish it— I think it does and may. To show that I am not making premises to
of
tion
its
convolutions.
And
further
changes like these which have taken place under the discipline of civilised
we
life, .
support a conclusion so abnormal, I will quote a passage from Mr. Spencer, the philosopher who has done most to illus-
.
.
infer will continue to take place.
But everywhere and always, evo-
lution
is
antagonistic to procreative dis-
Whether it be in greater growth of the organs which subserve self-maintenance, whether it be in their
solution.
trate this subject:
added complexity of structure, or whether it be in their higher activity,
That future progress of civilisation which the never-ceasing pressure of population must produce, will be accompanied by an enhanced cost of Individuation, both in structure and func-
the abstraction of the required materials implies a diminished reserve of materials for race-maintenance. And we have seen
reason to believe that this antagonism
484
Bagehot: Physics and Politics between Individuation and Genesis becomes unusually marked where the
The
concerned, because of the costliness of nervous structure and function. In § 346 was pointed out the apparent connection between high cerebral development and prolonged delay of sexual maturity; and in §§ 366, 367, the evidence went to show that where exceptional fertility exists there is sluggishness of mind, and that where there has been during education excessive expenditure in mental action, there frequently follows a complete or par-
to
nervous system
is
Hence
infertility.
tial
divert
strength
that
it
which
tends
the
cir-
have been shown to be near, and free government has, in a second case, been shown to tend to cure an inso far off
herited excess of
human
nature.
Lastly, a polity of discussion not only
tends to diminish our inherited defects, but
kind of further evolution which Man is hereafter to undergo, is one which, more than any other, may be expected to cause a decline in his power
heritable excellence. It tends to strengthen
of reproduction.
tion of qualities singularly useful in prac-
also,
one case
in
at least, to
an intellectual
life,
to lead one, will
many
children
men who have to live or who can be induced
be
as
likely not to
it
in
This
quality
If it is
man
the world from
power and vigor. But they will have their maximum of posteritywill not have so many as they would have had if they had been careless or thoughtless men; and so, upon an average, issue
be
such
of
less
intellectualized
numerous than those
Now, supposing
men
of the
this philosophical
doc-
be true— and the best philosophers,
think, believe it— its application to the
case in
hand
intellect
like
is
plain.
Nothing promotes discussion, and
nothing promotes intellectual discussion so
is
much
as
government by discussion. The perpetual atmosphere of intellectual inas
quiry acts powerfully, as everyone
may
in
each of our race; is
spent,
if it
goes in one in
who all
is
man
also a great
other writings,
I
of
think
Scott.
we
Homer was
can judge;
perfect in
Shakespeare
it,
is
as far
often
though then, from the defects of a bad education and a vicious age, all at once he loses himself in excesses. Still, Homer, and Shakespeare at his best, and Scott, though in other respects so unequal to them, have this remarkable quality in common— this union
see
in
and cannot go
of genius
perfect in
London, upon the constitution both of men and women. There is only a certain quantum of power
it
"animated
almost perfect instance of this in English
intellectual
by looking about him
call
he would use these same words, "animated moderation." He would say that such writings are never slow, are never excessive, are never exaggerated; that they are always instinct with judgment, and yet that the judgment is never a dull judgment; that they have as much spirit in them as would go to make a wild writer, and \et that every line of them is the product of a sane and sound writer. The best and
unintellectual.
trine to
I
anyone were asked to describe what which distinguishes the writings of a
of unusual
will
not easy to
moderation."
not
the
it is
would require not a remnant of an whole essay to elucidate com-
pletely.
ways
all
which
essay, but a
have so
they would otherwise
may be men
a
describe exactly, and the issues of which
have had. In particular cases this may not be true; such men may even have many children— they
augment
and increase a subtle quality or combinatical life— a quality
This means that
I
abstracts
cumstances of early society directed to the multiplication of numbers; and as a polity of discussion tends, above all things, to produce an intellectual atmosphere, the two things which seemed
particular
the
atmosphere
intellectual
strength to intellectual matters;
way
another.
485
it
for long together,
Great Books Library of
with
life
measure,
of
with
spirit
In action
it
equally this quality in
is
which the English— at for
them— excel
all
least so I claim
it
other nations. There
is
be laid against us; and unpopular with most others, and as we are always grumbling at ourselves, there is no want of people to say it. But, after all, in a certain sense, England is a success in the world; her career has had many faults, but still it has been a fine and winning career upon the whole. And this on account of the exact possession an
infinite deal to
as
we
of
are
this
managed to pull up "bewas any danger." He was an odd man to have inherited Hampden's motto; still, in fact, there was a great trace in him of mediocria /irma— as much, probably, as there could be in anyone of such great vivacity and buoyancy. It is plain that this is a quality which as much as, if not more than, any other multiplies good results in practical life. It enables men to see what is good; it gives them intellect enough for sufficient over; he always fore there
reasonableness.
particular
quality.
What
is
perception; but intellect;
of a successful
to
be sure to have this, or "Oh, he has plenty of go in him; but he knows when to pull up." He may have all other defects in him; he may be coarse, he may be illiterate, he may be stupid to talk to; still this great union of spur and bridle, of energy and moderation, will remain to him. Probably he will hardly be able to explain why he stops when he does stop, or why he continued to
as
is
polity
his
means. "He went,"
it
it
it
A
is
to the
man
in
soon
is
vigorous moderateis
the rule of a
and,
discussion;
the kind of temper
active
life
of such a
such a world
as
the
present one.
These three great
benefits of free gov-
ernment, though great, are entirely sec-
ondary
mode first
in
to
its
continued usefulness in the
which
it
was useful. The was the deliverance of
originally
great benefit
mankind from the superannuated yoke of customary law, by the gradual development of an inquisitive originality. And it continues to produce that effect upon per-
has
broken, and the
much
And
life,
mind and body which works by
being as
sons
apparently far remote from
its
in-
fluence, and on subjects with which it has nothing to do. Thus Mr. Mundella, a most
magic cannot be again revived. that his information was meager, that his imagination was narrow, that his aims were shortsighted and faulty. But, though we may often object to his obrarely find
be good,
and a bodiless scholar, cannot even
of political
most suited
think
we
to
a
upon the whole,
We may
jects,
that
live there for a day.
ness in
moved; but still, as by a rough instinct, he up pretty much where he should, though he was going at such a pace before. There is no better example of this quality in English statesmen than Lord Palmerston. There are, of course, many most serious accusations to be made against him. The sort of homage with which he was in the last years of his life
enables them
they are good.
thinker, an ineffectual
long as he, in fact,
passed away; the spell
plain
weeded out
pulls
regarded
it
disposed to extremes of opinion,
it:
move
all
government by popular discussion tends to produce this quality. A strongly idiosyncratic mind, violently is
will like
make men
do the good things they see
as well as to see that
description of a great practical English-
man, you something
does not
it
does not "sickly them o'er with
the pale cast of thought"; ^^
the
merchant? That he has plenty of energy, and yet that he does not go too far. And if you ask for a
making
it
experienced and capable judge,
tells
that the English artisan, though so less sober, less instructed,
and
us
much
less refined
to criticize in
has been said,
13 Hamlet, 47d.
"with a great swing"; but he never tumbled
486
III,
i.
85;
GBWW,
Vol.
27, p.
Bagehot: Physics and Politics than the artisans of some other countries,
obscure and important any defect
more inventive than any other artisan. The master will get more good suggestions from him than from any other. Again, upon plausible grounds— looking, for example, to the position of Locke and Newton in the science of the last century, and to that of Darwin in our own— it may be argued that there is some quality in English thought which makes them strike out as many, if not more, first-rate and
ter
is
yet
In a former essay that
and more diffused
culture
both cases
entific interest. In
I
attempted to show
I
than
causes
slighter
may change
thought
Commonly
agent
the
considered
on
operating
as
vidual in the nation, and
half-assumed,
that
agent
only
is
it
every
believe the
the
the
there
cause,
potent: a
semble
kinds of people
new model
it
first
impact
second
effect,
the characteristic
Of
among
itself it justifies, or
far to justify, our saying
this
to
lazy nation
into
men who men imitated
are different; different.
is
may be changed
A
into an in-
profane,
a
as
if
though
slight,
bination
causes,
however
of
if any any com-
by magic,
single cause,
or
subtle,
is
detested types of character.
This principle
so few have progressed, though to us progress seems so natural— what is the cause or set of causes which have prevented that progress in the vast majority of cases, and produced it in the feeble minority. But there is a preliminary difficulty: What is progress, and what is decline? Even in the animal world there is no applicable rule accepted by physiologists, which settles what animals are higher or
and and now that I am putting them together I wish to add another which shall shortly explain the main thread of the argument which by long consequent
serious illness
ill-health,
they contain. In doing so there of tedious repetition; but
help us in
why
nations
publication of these essays
was interrupted by
will, I think,
trying to solve the question
VERIFIABLE PROGRESS POLITICALLY CONSIDERED
The original
stand out are
strong enough to change the favorite and
to
heaven."
6.
it
dustrious, a rich into a poor, a religious
goes
it
re-
and multiplied; are persecuted and
the result of the imitation
glorious
pay
created
fewer. In a generation or two, the
different, the
with Montesquieu:
"Whatever be the cost of liberty, we must be content
is
which
look of the nation becomes quite different;
mankind, and so great are its fmits, that this one benefit of free government probably outweighs what are in many cases its evils.
in character
those contrasted with
other way, than a despotic government.
accessory
a
are encouraged
made
originality
is
for the nation; those characters
ready to use their mental energy in their own way, and not ready to use it in any great
effect
always considerable, and commonly more
and enlivens thought all through society; that it makes people think no harm may come of thinking; that in England this force has long been operating, and so it
is
the
produces
directly
of
rare
indi-
on everyone that need be considered. But be-
sci-
of the English originality to be government by discussion quickens
so
It is
assumed, or
it is
sides this diffused effect of the
And
the
looked on in the wrong way.
is
which
to the
of
effect
that
all
from the
and from the stationary
ilization,
degrading.
reason
has developed more of
commonly
is
a nation
stationary to the progressive state of civ-
original suggestions than nations of greater scientific
bet-
is
than an appearance of vagueness.
is
lower than others; there are controversies
about
a risk
it.
Still
more, then, in the more
complex combinations and
on a subject both
487
politics of
hu-
Great Books Library
man
beings,
likely to
is
it
be hard
more means
village there are
to find
of happiness,
an agreed criterion for saying which na-
a greater accumulation of the instruments
before another, or what age of a was marching forward and which was falling back. Archbishop Manning would have one rule of progress and de-
of enjoyment, than in the Australian tribe.
most important points, quite an opposite rule; what one would set down as an advance the other
addition,
tion
is
The English have
nation
cline; Professor
would
set
Huxley,
down
do not
in
Each has
as a retreat.
a
end which he wishes and a distinct calamity which he fears, but the desire of the one is pretty near the fear of the other; books would not hold the controversy between them. Again, in art, who is to settle what is advance and what decline? Would Mr. Ruskin agree with anyone else on this subject, would he even agree with himself, or could any common enquirer venture to say whether he was right or wrong? I
am
afraid that
I
progress,"
is if
And
particular
in
inven-
a general strength which
is
capable of being used in conquering
a
thousand
use
happiness,
of
possess
always feel
it
is
an abid-
because those that they can
it.
we
If
omit the
topics of morals I
and
difficulties,
source
who
think,
and
First, that
higher
but
disputed
religion,
we
shall find,
the plainer and agreed-on
that
superiorities of the
Englishmen are
they have a greater
these:
command
over the powers of nature upon the whole.
Though they may
fall
short of individual
Australians in certain feats of petty
though they
must, as Sir William
Hamilton used to say, "truncate a problem which I cannot solve." I must decline to sit in judgment on disputed points of art, morals, or religion. But without so doing I think there
beyond
and
is
ing
distinct
books,
of
use, value, or understand.
there
tions,
manner
all
and machines which the others
utensils,
may
skill,
not throw the boomerang
as well, or light a fire
with earthsticks as
such a thing as "verifiable
on the whole twenty Englishmen with their implements and skill can change the material world immeasurably more than twenty Australians and their ma-
we may
chines.
say
so;
that
well, yet
is,
Secondly, that this power
is
not
The
progress which ninety-nine hundredths or
external
mankind will admit to be such, which there is no established or organized opposition creed, and the ob-
English not only possess better machines
more
of
against
jectors
to
which,
essentially
varying
for
safely
another the reverse,
and altogether
in
in
lized
is
this
all.
Indisputably,
the
not only has greater powers
how
to
use
body and mind. He can lay up for old age, which a savage having no durable means of sustenance cannot; he is ready to lay up because he can distinctly foresee the future, which the vague-minded savage
European. Nor in
man
them, and by "better" I here mean better for the health and comfort of his present
outlying and uncontested districts of the intruding
themselves
to
over nature, but knows better
and that a main,
of the world, the aboriginal native lies at
mercy
are
precisely than the barbarian. Thirdly, civi-
They can beat the Australians in war when they like; they can take from them anything they like, and kill any of them they choose. As a rule,
the
but
internal.
to register
sense, they are superior.
in all the
nature,
also
augment the force of man, but and regulate the power of man; and this in a thousand ways civilized man can do, and is ready to do, better and more was not
may be
rejected.
one,
is
Mr. Babbage taught us years ago that one great use of machinery
Let us consider in what a village of English colonists is superior to a tribe of Australian natives who roam about them. Indisputably,
moving
it
better machines.
opinion themselves, and believing one one thing and
only;
cannot; he
English
488
is
mainly desirous of gentle,
Bagehot: Physics and Politics '
continuous pleasure, whereas the barbarian
Much,
fying repletion.
not
if
and
Spencer's phrase: that progress crease of adaptation of
ment—that wishes to thing of
it
is
an
in-
to his environ-
trary
of his internal
in a
in
may be
quite separately, as
it is
sense which has just been given to
may
single step in
invention
often brings immense reward certainly now; a new form of good steel pen, a way of making some kind of clothes a little better or a little cheaper, have brought men great fortunes. And there is the same kind of prize for industrial improvement in the earliest times as in the latest, though
the benefits so obtainable in early society
finest
are poor indeed in comparison with those
first,
"who
exalt themselves shall
those
who humble
exalted"; and,
i
I
life,
Still,
like
a
and most
in-
even' in the earliest
who can
help
have made the progress mankind— progress at least in this limited sense— exceedingly common; but, in fact, All this should
those
of
be abased, and shall be
any progress
may seem mean
is
extremely rare. As a rule
(and as has been insisted on before)
only to look for the laws of plain comfort
stationary state
and simple present happiness, yet we must work out that simple case first, before
condition of
we
her high
to
is
she gives her
themselves, and helps them very much.
themselves
though we
prizes
this:
society, nature helps those
by the highest enquirers: in
Nature
society.
structed classes.
of scientific humility so
as
advanced
schoolmaster, at least in
never solve hard problems.
investigations,
those
It
the whole history of philosophy teaches
in
himself or
likely to
is
bring increased happiness to the producer.
are content to solve simple problems
that,
benefits
be more comfortable himself and to be more respected by those around him. To produce new things "serviceable to man's life and conducive to man's estate" is, we should say, likely to
of
often insisted on
we
Everyone who makes an
it.
that
around him
Unless some kind of abstraction like this
maxim
it,
say that nature gives a prize to every
made in the subject, the great problem "What causes progress?" will, I am confident, long remain unsolved. Unless we
shall
a
and always, might well have been expected to "carry mankind rapidly forward." Indeed, taking verifiable progress in the
progress in a sort
is
the
is
And
these two principles, operating everywhere
value.
is
there
his condition."
think this
I
good everyone worth reckoning with in. No doubt there will remain people like the aged savage who in his old age went back to his savage tribe and said that he had "tried civilization for forty years, and it was not worth the trouble." But we need not take account of the mistaken ideas of unfit men and beaten races. On the whole the plainer sort of civilization, the simpler moral training, and the more elementary education are plain benefits. And, though there may be doubt as to the edges of the conception, yet there certainly is a broad road of "verifiable progress" which not only discoverers and admirers will like, but which all those who come upon it will use and
we
human being
tendency to ameliorate
admits and agrees
This
"In every experimental
a tendency towards per-
is
fection. In every
of
that
tells us:
fairly investigated
healthy body].
sort of progress
what we should expect. Lord
science there
corpore sano [a healthy
And
to
Macaulay
powers and his external lot and life. Sometoo is expressed in the old pagan is,
mens sana
mind
man
difficulty of solving the problems even thus limited is exceedingly great. The most palpable facts are exactly the con-
Mr.
in
religion.
The
of these
all,
ways may be summed up
three
idea
tional difficulties of the higher art, morals,
wild excitement, and longs for stupe-
likes
a
by far the most frequent man, as far as history deis
scribes that condition; the progressive state
encounter the incredibly harder addi-
is
489
only a rare and an occasional exception.
Great Books Library Before history began there must have
When
the second principle
one another to co-operate
to
The
readily together.
heart and there
spirit;
and
this
mind and
feeling,
may have been
in-
should
likeness
however that
I
believe to have been pro-
should think
if
it
were
I
taken up in these papers, and this
which
outline of the solution
tempted
The
rule
man
progress of
men
for
its
which any one man
progress
isolated
true,
be traced. The rudest
have
at-
is
man
were
sidered
exist.
that
The
that isolated
stronger
man
first
man can
operative groups"; nations, but
I
make I
less
tribes
common
better
than
than a
life
the
chief."
regulated by
and that sort of bad specimen, but the nature of customary law as we everywhere find it in its earliest stages is that of coarse casual comprehensive usage, beginning, we cannot tell how, deciding, we cannot tell why, but ruling everyone in almost every action with an
than
is
progress in "co-
might say
use the
himself
imitation? This
(if
principle of the subject
only
and
is,
of course, a
inflexible grasp.
The
term
necessity of thus forming co-opera-
because few people would at once see that tribes and nations are co-operative groups,
necessity of isolation in early society.
and that
a matter of fact all great nations
it
their value;
is
their being so
that unless
a
the
that sort of obedience
he ever existed in any shape which could be called man), might very easily have ceased to isolated
And
often of most childish origin, be-
What can be worse
and the feeblest
much
so
this
could never
sort of co-operative
society, the lowest tribe
government,
if
rule.
"These people," says Captain Palmer of the Fiji, "are very conservative. A chief was one day going over a mountain-path followed by a long string of his people, when he happened to stumble and fall; all the rest of the people immediately did the same except one man, who was set upon by the rest to know whether he con-
obviously
is
it— but
called
implacable
accident.
the
any one family
And even
exceedingly limited.
no
is
"rose-water" authority,
have
is
requires the co-
or
authority of "cus-
earlier stage this
ginning in a casual superstition or local
development. That
could invent for themselves
is
we
be reimposed
terrible tyrannies ever
would have
stern, incessant,
to propose.
operation of
not
I
power— no
Carlyle
as
its
to
is
should expect? This
the problem which in various forms
likeness
of the strongest yokes (as
pleasant
from the
different
so
we
when
duced by one
tomary law." In
them) produced those obvious and Why have the real fortunes
mankind been
felt
This needful co-operation and this requisite
natural effects?
fortunes which
only
attained.
known among men— the
of
is
all
union of
felt
a great degree of real likeness in
is
now) and the most
call
enough and
easily
co-operation in
such cases depends on a
and pretty much where they are now. Why, then, have not the obvious and
we
And
members
that the
is
capable of history, arrested, unprogressive,
natural causes of progress (as
by some
out
of such a group should be similar
history begins
most of the races
to record, she finds
killed
other society which has such a bond.
in the nation
constructed a planet.
conquered and
be
which wrote it much progress; else there could have been no history. It is a great advance in civilization to be able to describe the common facts of life, and perhaps, if we were to examine it, we should find that it was at least an equal advance to wish to describe them. But very few races have made this step of progress; very few have been capable even of the meanest sort of history; and, as for writing such a history as that of Thucydides, most nations could as soon have been
tive
which makes
groups by fixed customs explains the
As have been
prepared in privacy and in secret. They have been composed far away from all
you can make a
strong co-operative bond, your society will
490
Bagehot: Physics and Politics Greece, Rome, Judea, were framed each by itself, and the antipathy of each to men of different race and different speech is one of their most marked pecuharities, and quite their strongest comdistraction.
than the ill-bound families which indeed
seem hardly "paternity"
be families
to
is,
at
where
all,
an un-
for tribal purposes,
recognized idea, and where only the physi-
of an admitted unbelief destroys the bind-
is thought to be be the foundation of law or custom. The nations with a thoroughly compacted family system have "possessed the earth," that is, they have taken all the finest districts in the most competed-for parts; and the nations with loose systems have been merely left to mountain ranges and lonely islands. The
ing authority of religious custom and snaps
family system, and that in
the social cord.
has been so exclusively the system of civi-
mon
property.
ages
is
And
early ages. Intercourse with foreigners then
broke
down
in states the fixed rules
were forming and unsettled
fiber of
be mind, of desultory
action; the living spectacle
Thus we see the use
when
bad because
the
ideas
it
prevents
because
it
trade
it
"brings
scattered
infuses distracting
ioned
be-
tutions.
The
bad
the
of
the
elder
if I
may
say
so,
afraid to walk simply about the world: he cannot do this because it is ominous, or he must do that because it is lucky, or he cannot do anything at all till the gods have spoken and given him leave to begin. But under the higher religions there is no is
insti-
great victory of civiliza-
families
similar slavery
and no similar terror. The Greek that "the one best
tracing descent through
belief
the father as well as the mother, or through
omen
the father only. Such compact families are a much better basis for military discipline
14 Homer, Iliad,
families
structure
should hardly admit the pos-
They have given what I may call a confidence in the universe. The savage subjected to a mean superstition
was the conquest
definite
we
great physical advantage,
of nations with illhaving legal descent through the mother only, by nations of tion
defined
for the
over the worse.
the best institutions have a
first
were not
of something so contrary to all which we have lived amongst, and which we have been used to think of. After such an example of the fragmentary nature of the evidence it is in comparison easy to believe that hundreds of strange institutions may have passed away and have left behind them not only no memorial, but not even a trace or a vestige to help the imagination to figure what they were. I cannot expand the subject, but in the same way the better religions have had a
The characters which do war are the characters which we should wish to win in war.
natural military advantage over
hardly recognizes
if it
sibility
in
Similarly,
highest form,
communities which are "fash-
after
world,"
alien
best characters.
win
that,
its
living testimony of a great multitude of
minds to alien shores." And, as the trade which we now think of as an incalculable good is in that age a formidable evil and destructive calamity, so war and conquest, which we commonly and justly see to be evils now, are in that age often singular benefits and great advantages. It is only by the competition of customs that bad customs can be eliminated and good customs multiplied. Conquest is the premium given by nature to those national characters which their national customs have made most fit to win in war, and in many most material respects those winning characters are really the cause
to
literature
any other, and
is
separation
among occupied communities,
that
lization
of a sort of "pre-
liminary" age in societies,
of nations,
which
their characters, so as to
weak
a cause of
enough
certain
the instinct of early
guide for the needs of
right
a
cal fact of "maternity"
491
of is
the
to fight for the fatherland"; ^^ the
12,
243;
GBWW,
Vol. 4.
Great Books Library belief of the
Roman
he was
that
mous
to trust
gods of Rome, for those gods are stronger than all others; the belief of in the
Cromwell's trust in
soldiery
They
all
who
principle
the fortiftjing religions— that
is
it is
to
mankind, for thing which
The
bind
men
strong
bond
first
work
is
an
it. We have brought in the yoke of custom to improve the world, and in the world the custom sticks. In a thousand cases— in the great majority of cases— the progress of mankind has been arrested in this, its earliest shape; it has been closely
of the
together in the
bound by a
embalmed
way. Every nation
co-operative
fixed custom;
and out
its
of those
and most invigorating customs, and these are, as a rough rule, the best
binding
The
majority
of
the
"groups"
which win and conquer are better than the majority of those which fail and perish, and thus the first world grew better and was improved. This early customary world no doubt continued for ages. The
first
a
mummy-like
primitive existence.
imitation of
I
then "the tendency in every rate
his
man
to amelio-
condition" begins to be impor-
because then man can alter his condiwhile before he is pegged down by ancient usage; then the tendency in each
history de-
tant,
composed
tion,
lineates great monarchies, each
in
have endeavored to show in what manner, and how slowly, and in how few cases, this yoke of custom was removed. It was "government by discussion" which broke the bond of ages and set free the originality of mankind. Then, and then only, the motives which Lord Macaulay counted on to secure the progress of mankind, in fact, begin to work;
group,"
groups those conquer which have the most
customs.
was formed and guidable
that
gentle
ing
of a rough, coarse, harsh cus-
"hereditary
was then
not in preserving such a world but in end-
tom; and the incessant conflict of nations effects this in the best
it;
we now call human nature. And indeed the greatest difficulty is
mind
to
it
comparatively
tendency to cultivate the force of at the expense of the force of the body, for example, help in their respective degrees to make men less warlike than they would otherwise be. But these are the tion, a
is
should exist
munities, but those ages were not lost to
the
ages
it
nature was to be grad-
—some strange recurrence to a primitive past. Long ages of dreary monotony are the first facts in the history of human com-
quisite sense of beauty, a love of medita-
first
The
not a new-looking
ble of civilization— in a word,
which lay the plainest stress on the manly parts of morality, on valor, on truth and industry— have had plainly the most obvious effect in strengthening the races which believed them, and in making those races the winning races. No doubt many sorts of primitive improvement are pernicious to war; an ex-
virtues of other ages.
is
necessary that
human
than the one before
say, those
the
world
which must have generations.
more legal and such inherited improvements are always slow and dubious. Though a few gifted people may advance much, the mass of each generation can improve but very little on the generation which preceded it; and even the slight improvement so gained is liable to be destroyed by some mysterious atavism
take the world as it comes," to be guided by no unreal reason, and to be limited by no mystic scruple; whenever they found anything to do, to do it with their might. And, more directly, what I call
of
must be born better tamed, more calm, more capa-
"to
may
all
many
ually improved, each generation
them
believe
historical
for ages. If
narrowest sense.
its
enabled those
and
very
for
thing but a very ancient, and according to
powder dry"— upward progress,
their
these are great steps in
using "progress" in
first
they were "to
that
God and keep
antiquity,
existed
a hundred customary groups, all of which believed themselves to be of enor-
of
mechanical art towards perfection begins
492
Bagehot: Physics and Politics to
have
because the
force,
work
artist is at last
been forced for ages to move in the straight furrow of the old fixed way.
As soon
as this great step
once made, gifts
and a
or almost
all,
and graces definite
upwards
all,
the higher
humanity have a rapid effect on "verifiable prog-
ress"— on progress in the narrowest, because in the most universally admitted,
depends, as
we have
seen,
life,
then,
more than any-
much and do
thing else on "animated moderation," on a certain combination of energy of
mind and
by
all
the finer graces of humanity.
common
is
what
are
impediments and encumbrances
era they are
among the greatest helps and and that as soon as governments by discussion have become strong enough to secure a stable existence, and as soon as they have broken the fixed rule of old custom, and have awakened the dormant inventiveness of men, then, for the first benefits,
metaand judgment
termed "poise of mind," till
whether those of life or those have done all that they have to do,
contribute
of art,
even
their full type plainly
human
time, almost every part of
nature
begins to spring forward, and begins to
the stream of im-
pressions,
and cut
in the
and espe-
the power of true passiveness— the
faculty of "waiting"
this
together,
yet apt to break out, sooner
is
expand
to
plain that, though
early fighting period, yet that in the later
physics, probably both taste
that
is
fine judg-
or later, into gross practical error. In
involve
no need
is
principle
these better and higher graces of humanity
It is a
cially that a man with gross want of taste, though he may act sensibly and correctly is
The
and
often separated, fine taste
for a while,
and so often leaves them
it ill,
But there further.
observation that, though
ment go very much
"moderation"
that
without money and without respect.
at last
balance of mind, hard to attain and harder to keep. And this subtle excellence is aided
matter of
producing
even in its most narrow and mundane way, might be worked out in a hundred cases, though it would not suit these pages. Many of the finer intellectual tastes have a similar restraining effect; they prevent, or tend to prevent, a greedy voracity after the good things of life, which makes both men and nations in excessive haste to be rich and famous, often makes them do too
is
of
sense of the term. Success in
in
which, upon the whole and as a rule, is essential to long success, defining success
allowed to seek perfection, after having
upon the
its
quota even to the narrowest,
to "verifiable," progress.
the true reason of
mind. The ill-judging and the untasteful
liberty
move too quickly this way the union
all
And
this
is
those panegyrics on
which are often
measured
so
in
are both over-eager; both
expression but are in essence so true to
and blur the image. In between a subtle sense of beauty and a subtle discretion in conduct is a natural one, because it rests on the common pos-
life
session of a fine power, though, in matter
an originality of mind,
and nature. Liberty
the strengthen-
is
power— the light and nature; and when some
ing and developing
heat of political
"Caesarism" exhibits, as
may be often disturbed. complex sea of forces and passions troubles men in life and action, which in the calmer region of art are hardly to be felt at all. And, therefore, the cultivation of a fine taste tends to promote the function of a fine judgment, which is a main help in the complex world of civilized existence. Just so, too, the manner in which
managed
make
it it
sometimes will, only because
is
own
of fact, that union
it
A
ucts of past free times or neighboring free
the
more
has
to
its
the prod-
and even that originality is only frail, and after a little while, when tested by a generation or two, in time of need it falls away. In a complete investigation of all the countries; brief
and
conditions of "verifiable progress,"
would have
much
For example, science has secrets of her own. Nature does
else
delicate parts of religion daily
to
be
set out.
493
iM
Great Books Library not wear her most useful lessons on her
capital both are going to.
most productive secrets, those which yield the most wealth and the most "fruit," to those who have gone through a long process of preliminary
misread the matter, such was often the case with early knowledge. At any rate before a complete theory of "verifiable
sleeve; she only yields her
abstraction.
To make
is
it would have be settled whether this is so or not, and the conditions of the development of physical science would have to be fully stated; obviously you cannot explain the development of human comfort unless you know the way in which men learn and discover comfortable things. Then again, for a complete discussion, whether of progress or degradation, a whole course of analysis is
to
not easy, and
even simple problems in abstract dynamics is to most people exceedingly hard. And yet it is on these out-of-the-way to solve
investigations, so to speak, that the art of
navigation,
all
physical astronomy, and
all
movements at least depend. But no nation would beforehand have thought that in so curious a manner such great secrets were to be discovered. And many nations, therefore, which get on the wrong track, may be distanced— supposing there to be no communication— by some nation not better than any of them which happens to stumble on the right track. If there were no "Bradshaw" and no one knew the time at which trains the theory of physical
started,
a
man who
would not be a wiser like
man
than he
necessary as to the effect of natural agencies
or a
more
missed
it,
and of change
But upon those
way
in
those
I
cannot touch; the only great problems
to solve these
is
to
them separately. I only profess to explain what seem to me the political prerequisites of progress, and especially of take
early progress.
the subject that even
business-
and yet
he would arrive whole hours sooner
on man,
agencies.
caught the express
who
I
progress" could be made,
a person really under-
stand the "laws of motion"
And, unless
is if
I
do
this the rather
insufficiently
my
because
examined, so
views are found to be
faulty, the discussion
upon them may bring
out others which are truer and better.
at the
494
Bagehot: Physics and Politics
NOTE TO THE READER Great
and
Books of the Western World conprimary documents that Physics and Politics draws upon: Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Readers wishing to pursue an investigation of the biological background of the theory of evolution should consult the Syntopicon Chapter 24: Evolution, especially passages cited under Topic 4: The theory of evolution: the origin of plant and animal species. As the reader soon discovers, by "physics," Bagehot means "science." For a general discussion of the scientific method, readers should review the passages cited under Science 4: The nature of scientific knowledge. Passages cited under Science lb (2): The effects of science on human life: the economic
implications
social
be useful. Bagehot spends
tains the
technology,
of
will
also
some
time
discussing
Readers will find the Syntopicon chapter entitled Progress a mine of information concerning the idea of the
notion
of
progress.
progress.
The reader desiring further information concerning the nature of human communities should consult the passages referred to in State 1: The nature of human society, and State
3c;
of nature Finally,
tempt
to
The and for
condition of
an
in the state
of another atunderstand society,
illustration
"scientifically"
the reader might contrast with that of Karl Marx.
495
man
in the state of civil society.
Bagehot's
work
THE ABOLITION OF MAN
C.S.
LEWIS
INTRODUCTION
The Abolitionthe
Man
of
livered at
The book
carried as
its
Memorial Lectures de-
consists of the Riddell
University of
Durham and
first
published in 1943.
subtitle the words, "Reflections
special reference to the teaching of English in the
on education with
upper forms of schools."
But, as the reader soon discovers, the English school texts with which
Lewis begins
his discussion
tion of the nature of
provide merely the occasion for an explora-
man and
morality.
At the time he gave the lectures, Lewis was not only well known as a scholar and teacher at Oxford but he had also won his first fame as a Christian apologist. The Screwfape Letters, in which a devil named Screwtape advises a neophyte devil on how to capture his first soulgiving "the psychology of temptation from the other point of view"— appeared in The Guardian in 1941 and were published as a book the following year. Its popularity was instantaneous and immense— so much so that Lewis later expressed some annoyance at constantly being identified as the author of Screwtape.
In fact, his literary genius expressed
He was
itself in
many
a master of fantasy. In the trilogy consisting of
different forms.
Out
of the Silent
Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945), he exploited the devices of science fiction to picture the trials, temptations,
and joys of life on Mars and Venus, and an Armageddon on earth in which all the powers of heaven take part. The last of the three he described as a "tall story about devilry" which had behind it the "serious point" made in The Abolition of Man. In seven volumes of children's stories, which appeared between 1950 and 1956, he created a fairyland peopled with many of the creatures of mythology. Till (1956) is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche
by Apuleius, see GGB, Vol. 3, pp. 197-212). In the field of literary scholarship, Lewis is best
We
Have Faces
(for the ancient
version
known
for his
work
medieval studies. In The Allegory of Love (1936) he analyzed the tradition and achievement of courtly love in its relation to romantic love and to marriage. The Discarded Image, published posthumously in 1964, presents the common, more or less unquestioned, image of the world taken for granted by medieval writers. In EnglisJi Literature in the Sixteenth in
498
Man
Lewis: The Abolition of
Century Excluding Drama (1954), written for the Oxford History of Enhe discusses and evaluates the Hterature of the Renaissance. But in all these works he assumes, when not explicitly arguing for it, the continuity of classical, medieval, and Renaissance culture. Then there is the group of works to which The Abolition of Man belongs. This group is harder to classify than the first two. It is analytic and more or less philosophic in tone, although also frequently theological and apologetic. The best known of these works are The Problem of Pain (1940), Miracles (1947), and the study on the nature of love, entitled Four Loves (1960). Lewis also wrote poetry— Ft7gnm'5 Regress (1933) and Poems (1964) —and a reticent, autobiographical account of his conversion to Christianity, Surprised by Joy (1955). glish Literature,
Clive
Staples Lewis
was born
in Belfast, Ireland,
November
29, 1898,
the second son of a prosperous solicitor and a clergyman's daughter.
when he was ten. After several years in private schools both Northern Ireland and England, all of which he disliked intensely, he went to live with and be tutored by a retired headmaster in Great His mother died
in
Bookham, Surrey. He won Oxford
a classical scholarship at University College
were interrupted by military where he was wounded. In 1919 he returned to Oxford to start upon the pattern of life he was to follow until his death. He took a first class honors degree in both classics and English. Then, after a year as tutor at University College, he was appointed to a fellowship at Magdalen College, where he remained until 1954. In that year he became professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature in the University of Cambridge, although he continued to keep his house in Oxford. With one exception, Lewis led the typical life of a quiet and retiring scholar and teacher. The one exception— and it made all the diflFerence to his life— was his conversion to Christianity. Although brought up nominally in the Anglican Church, it had meant little to him, and as a youth he confessed himself an atheist. But largely as a result of his reading and arguing at Oxford, and discovering that the authors and men he admired most were Christians, he rejoined the Anglican Church in 1931. As a consequence, the don became an apologist. John Wain, the novelist, has written: "C. S. Lewis was a rare case of the don who is forced into the limelight by the demands of his own conscience. He would never have bothered to court the mass public at all had he not seen it as his duty to in 1918,
but
his university studies
service in France,
.
.
.
defend the Christian faith against the hostility or indiflFerence that surrounded it." During the war years he was highly successful as a radio speaker presenting the case for Christianity. He reached an even larger audience with his fiction, all of \\^hich is permeated with his Christian .
belief;
.
.
in fact, his children's stories are largely allegories of Christian
teaching.
499
Great Books Library In personality and appearance, Lewis has often been compared with
Dr. Johnson,
whom
he admired. Thus
his friend
and colleague, Nevill
Coghill, writes:
Both were formidable
in their learning and in the range of their had the same delight in argument, and in spite of their regard for truth, would argue for victory. Lewis had Johnson's handiness with the butt end of a pistol if an argument misfired. Like Johnson, he was a largish, unathletic-looking man, heavy but not tall, with a roundish, florid face that perspired easily and showed networks of tiny blood-vessels on close inspection; he had a dark flop of hair and rather heavily pouched eyes; these eyes gave life to the face, they were large and brown and unusually expressive. The main effects were of a mild, plain powerfulness, and over all there was a sense of simple masculinity, of a virility absorbed into
conversation, both
intellectual
For most of
life.
his life
Lewis was a bachelor. Then, in 1956, he married widow with two children, and discovered, he
Joy Davidman Gresham, a
said, in his sixties the joys that
had been
had passed him by
when he married
in his twenties. His wife
on her death in 1960, he attempted to assuage his grief by the series of notes published as A Grief Observed. Lewis himself was seriously ill during the last years of his Hfe, too ill to be operated upon. He died November 22, 1963. ill
with cancer
her, and,
CONTENTS 1
Men
2
The
3
The Abolition
without Chests
501
Way
510 of
Man
Appendix— Illustrations
519
of the
500
Tao
531
Man
Lewis: The Abolition of 1.
MEN WITHOUT
the authors are not yet finished.
CHESTS
'This
confusion
—CAROL
Before raised
schools.' I
and do
You remember
that there
one called
it
'sublime'
Coleridge
and the other
'pretty':
endorsed
mentally
ings associated in
.
simply
feelings
which make a man
call
be reduced speaker's
at all to a statement
feelings,
The
an object
sublime are not sublime feelings but ings of veneration. If This is sublime
feelis
to
about the
the proper translation
would be / have humble feelings. If the view held by Gains and Titius were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that You are contemptible means I have contemptible feelings: in fact that Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are contemptible. But we need not delay over this which is the very pons asinorum of our subject. It would be unjust to Gains and Titius themselves to emphasize what was doubtless a mere inad-
first
vertence.
The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two proposi-
.
my mind
eliminate
opposites, of the qualities projected.
judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gains and Titius comment as follows: 'When the man said That is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really / have feel.
we must
and solely projected into from our own emotions, yet the emotions which prompt the projection are the correlatives, and therefore almost the
and that the
really
paragraph remember, for 'the up-
things
names. I shall refer to these gentlemen as Gains and Titius and to their book as The Green Book. But I promise you there is such a book and I have it on my shelves. In their second chapter Gains and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge tourists present: that
issues
little
granted that such qualities as sublimity
were
to conceal their
at the waterfall.
the
momentous
one mere confusion into which Gains and Titius have fallen. Even on their own view— on any conceivable view— the man who says This is sublime cannot mean / have sublime feelings. Even if it were
not think the authors of this book (there were two of them) intended any harm, and I owe them, or their publisher, good language for sending me a complimentary copy. At the same time I shall have nothing good to say of them. Here is a pretty predicament. I do not want to pillory two modest practising school-masters who were doing the best they knew: but I cannot be silent about what I think the actual tendency of their work. I therefore propose
were two
considering this
per forms in schools')
little
for 'boys
by
(designed, you will
doubt whether we are sufficiently attenI tive to the importance of elementary text-books. That is why I have chosen as the starting-point for these lectures a
They add:
continually present in
language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.'^
So he sent the word to slay And slew the little childer
book on English intended girls in the upper forms of
is
tions: firstly, that all sentences containing
a predicate of value are statements about
the emotional state of the speaker, and,
with the word
secondly, that
"Sublime" or shortly, / have sublime feelings' Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But
portant. It
1
501
is
all
such statements are unim-
true that Gains
The Green Book,
pp. 19, 20.
and Titius
Great Books Library have said neither of these things in so many words. They have treated only one
exhibits. 2
particular predicate of value (sublime) as
'across the
word descriptive of the speaker's emotions. The pupils are left to do for themselves the work of extending the same treatment to all predicates of value: and no
Devon
those
a
slightest
obstacle
such
to
extension
five
minutes'
on the schoolboy's mind. In the same way,
words are that we
'appear to be saying something very im-
we
are 'only saying
something about our own feelings.' No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word only. I do not mean, of course, that he will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that
all
warmer among the
The very power of Gains and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at trivial.
stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence
him to take one which he has never
unconscious, will condition
recognized as a controversy at authors themselves,
I
all.
suspect, hardly
The know
what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.
purpose, are actually do
Before considering the philosophical cre-
which Gains and have adopted about value, I should to show its practical results on their
uncommonly
is
shy.
ous motor-vessel won't really
Drake
procedure.
chapter they quote a a pleasure cruise
silly
In
their
What
they
sail
where have
did, that the tourists will not
fourth 2 Ibid., p. 53. 3 Journey to the Western Islands. Inch Ken-
advertisement of
and proceed
They
to point out that the luxuri-
Titius like
'golden
ruins of lona.'^
dentials of the position
educational
of
might have taken that place in The Prelude where Wordsworth describes how the antiquity of London first descended on his mind with 'Weight and power. Power growing under weight.'^ A lesson which had laid such literature beside the advertisement and really discriminated the good from the bad would have been a lesson worth teaching. There would have been some blood and sap in it— the trees of knowledge and of life growing together. It would also have had the merit of being a lesson in literature: a subject of which Gains and Titius, despite their professed
values are subjective and
side in a controversy
and bringing home 'treasure'
'
they have not said that judgements of value
in reality
a
is a bad bit and bathetic exploitation of those emotions of awe and pleasure which men feel in visiting places that have striking associations with histoi or legend. If Gains and Titius were to stick to their last and teach their readers (as they promised to do) the art of English composition, it was their business to put this advertisement side by side with passages from great writers in which the very same emotion is well expressed, and then show where the difference lies. They might have used Johnson's famous passage from the Western Islands, which concludes: 'That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow
the effect their book will certainly have
when
also
hours' and 'glowing colours.' It
thought in their lives, I am not concerned with what they desired but with
portant'
of
'adventuring after the trea-
of writing, of course: a venal
is
serious
are unimportant. Their
us that
Western Ocean where Drake
sailed,'
themselves
not desire the extension: they
never have given the question
tells
tickets for this cruise will go
sures of the Indies,'
may or may
placed in their way. The authors
may
The advertisement
who buy
to inoculate
their pupils against the sort of writing
neth.
4 The Prelude,
it
502
viii, 11.
549-59.
ij
j |
Great Books Library of the 'Western
any adventures, that the treasures they home will be of a purely metaphorical nature, and that a trip to Margate might provide 'all the pleasure and rest'
Ocean' on the very dangerin so doing he will prove
ous ground that
bring
himself a knowing fellow
bubbled out of
his cash.
who
can't
Gains and
be
Titius,
is
very true: talents
while teaching him nothing about
inferior to those of Gains
and Titius would
have cut out of his soul, long before he is old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful, and humane.
they required.'^ All this
have sufficed to discover it. What they have not noticed, or not cared about, is that a very similar treatment could be applied to much good literature which treats the same emotion. What, after all, can the history
early
of
pure reason, they exist in should Mr. comfortable
add
Christianity,
British
But
to the motives for piety as
the eighteenth century?
Wordsworth's inn
Why
tion,
be more
there
schoolboy
will
learn
quickly
delibly,
enough,
the
is
belief
learn
will
and perhaps
in-
that
all
under the same general anaesthetic,
And he falls into the same trap and Titius. Of Ruksh and Sleipnir and the weeping horses of Achilles and the war-horse in the Book of Job— nay even of Brer Rabbit and of Peter Rabbit— of man's prehistoric piety to 'our brother the all that this semi-anthropomorphic treatment of beasts has meant in human
ox'— of
history
and of the
literature
where
word
emotions
to
say.''^
Even
of the problems of
he says nothing.
explaining that horses are not,
immune
to
those
who
it
are above
whom we
offer
in
falls
a
false
superiority in factual truth.
trary,
is
The
specifically
literary
is not tackled. Orbilius indeed us (p. 97) that we must 'learn to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate figurative statement,' but he ^ives us very little help in doinp so. At the same time it is fair to record my opinion that
litteram) tells
mind. On the conencouraged to reject the lure
the schoolboy's
he
secundum
problem (the use and abuse of expressions which are false secundum
leading
article on patriotism and honour: one is the coward, the other is the honourable and patriotic man. None of this is brought be-
fore
contents himself with
6 Orbilius' book, p. 5. 7 Orbilius is so far superior to Gaius and Titius that he does (pp. 19-22) contrast a piece of good writing on animals with the piece condemned. Unfortunately, however, the only superiority he really demonstrates in the second extract is its
it
vain
He
such an ad-
equally flat on and those who are below it, on the man of real sensibility and on the mere trousered ape who has never been able to conceive the Atlantic as anything more than so many million tons of cold salt water. There are two men to
vertisement—that
finds
animal psychology as they exist for science
have no notion that there are two
of being
it
noble or piquant expression— he has not a
He
ways
the
as Gains
aroused by local association are in themselves contrary to reason and contemptible. will
as
Australia.^
about
What he
will
'willing servants' of the early colonists in
Virgil, and Thomas Browne, and Mr. de la Mare) as The Green Book debunks the advertisement. Gains and Titius have given their schoolboy readers no faintest help to its discovery. From this
literature precisely nothing.
I
the same opera-
where these animals are praised
is
Lamb, and
passage the
book, whose author
being carried out. Orbilius chooses for 'debunking' a silly bit of writing on horses,
air of London more London has existed for a
if
not only Gains and Titius. In
is
indeed any obstacle which will prevent a critic from 'debunking' Johnson and Wordsworth (and long time? Or,
is
little
call Orbilius, I find that
or the
healthy because
it
another
in
letters,
work is on ciuite The Green Book.
his
5 The Green Book, pp. 53-55.
504
a different level from
Lewis: The Abolition of
philosophical and not a literary position.
litteram, interested in colonial expansion.^
This piece of information his pupils get
before them
sition
that
from him.
open
lie
to the
is
In
really all that
is
Why
the compo-
when
bad,
same charge
are good,
tively,
whom
a horse
means
of transport.
own
Some
lost:
some incentive to cruelty or neglect they will have received: some pleasure in their own knowingness will have entered their minds. That is their day's lesson in English, though of English they have learned nothing. Another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to
who
it
following reasons. In the
ary criticism
is
first
difficult,
much
place, liter-
and what they
To
explain
a bad treatment of some basic
human
actually do
why
very
is
easier.
emotion is bad literature is, if we exclude all question-begging attacks on the emotion itself, a very
Dr. Richards,
hard thing to do. Even
who
first
seriously tackled
the problem of badness in literature, failed,
understand.
think, to do it. To 'debunk' the emotion, on the basis of a commonplace rationalism,
have hitherto been assuming that such
I
they have been
But I doubt whether Gaius and Titius have really planned, under cover of teaching English, to propagate their philosophy. I think they have slipped into it for the
pleasure in their
ponies and dogs they will have
it
theory.
merely an old-fashioned
is
book with
and who has got the work of amateur philosophers where he expected the work of professional grammarians. A man would be annoyed if his son returned from the dentist with his teeth untouched and his head crammed with the dentist's obiter dicta on bimetallism or the Baconian buys
others
two classes above and below the danger of such writing— the man who really knows horses and really loves them, not with anthropomorphic illusions, but with ordinate love, and the irredeemable urban blockhead to of the
filling their
unjust to the parent or headmaster
Much less do they learn of men who are, respec-
they do not hear.
Man
I
teachers as Gaius and Titius do not fully realize
what they
intend
the
are doing
far-reaching
There
and do not
consequences
within almost anyone's capacity. In the second place, I think Gaius and Titius may
is
it
may be
have honestly misunderstood the pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda— they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental— and
they really wish
they conclude that the best thing they
The differences between us the way down. They may really the ordinary human feelings
can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale.
about the past or animals or large water-
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The
will actually have.
other possibility.
suming on
What
I
is,
of course, an-
have called
(pre-
their concurrence in a certain
traditional system of values) the 'trousered
ape'
and the
urban blockhead'
precisely the kind of to
man
produce.
may go hold
falls
all
that
are contrary to reason
and contempt-
and ought to be eradicated. They may be intending to make a clean sweep of ible
traditional set.
values and start with a
That position
If it is
new
task of the
down
be discussed later. the position which Gaius and Titius
are holding,
I
will
right defence
must, for the moment, con-
tent myself with pointing out that
it
is
to inculcate
is
not to cut
just
sentiments.
By
we
505
is
starving
only
easier prey to the propagandist
he comes. For famished nature
9.
The
against false sentiments
the sensibility of our pupils
a
them 8 Ibid., p.
modern educator
jungles but to irrigate deserts.
make when
will
be
Great Books Library
avenged and a hard heart
who
no infalHble
is
But there
is
a third,
was
and a profounder,
reason for the procedure which Gains and
and
called the cataract sublime
agreed with the one
protection against a soft head.
of course that
who
called
it
dis-
pretty
he believed inanimate
nature to be such that certain responses
They may be perfectly ready admit that a good education should
Titius adopt.
could be more
'just'
to
propriate' to
than others.
it
or 'ordinate' or 'ap-
And he
be-
some sentiments while destroying others. They may endeavour to do so. But
lieved (correctly) that the tourists thought
impossible that they should succeed.
sublime was not intending simply to de-
build
it
is
Do what
they
will,
of their work, will
really
it is
and
tell.
In
the same.
the 'debunking' side
this side alone,
order
grasp
to
scribe his
which
times
all
disagree about. pretty
in
teachers
fact,
that
objects did not merely receive, but could merit,
our approval or disapproval,
why
our
our contempt. The reason Coleridge agreed with the tourist
reverence,
the
object
he was was one
it:
for this
if
To
disagree with This
is
those words simply described the
would be absurd: if she would hardly have replied No; I feel quite well. When Shelley, having compared the human sensibility to an Aeolian lyre, goes on to add that it differs from a lyre in having a power of 'internal adjustment' whereby it can 'accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them,'^ he is assuming lady's
and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it— believed,
emotions about that
claim there would be nothing to agree or
had
modem
called the cataract
which merited those emotions. But
this
I
predecessors. Until quite
own
claiming
also
must digress for a moment to show that what may be called the educational predicament of Gains and Titius is different from that of all their necessity clearly
The man who
feelings,
said I feel sick Coleridge
or
9 Defence of Poetry.
506
Lewis: The Abolition of conduct
the same belief. 'Can you be righteous,' asks Traherne, 'unless you be just in ren-
Man in
men which can be
good
called
consists in conformity to, or almost par-
Rfa— that
dering to
things their due esteem? All were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their
ticipation in, the
things
pattern of nature and supernature which
St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is ac-
moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the
corded that kind and degree of love which
or truth, correspondence to reality.
revealed
value.' 1^
is
appropriate to
it.^^
alike
in
great ritual or
the cosmic order,
is
the
temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta,
is
constantly identified with satya
Good was 'beyond
said that the
Aristotle says that
As Plato
existence'
what he ought. ^^ when the
and Wordsworth that through virtue the stars were strong, so the Indian masters say
age for reflective thought comes, the pupil
that the gods themselves are born of the
the aim of education like
and
who
dislike
is
to
make
the pupil
Rta and obey
has been thus trained in 'ordinate
find the
first
the corrupt at all
the Tao.
principles in Ethics: but to
man
they will never be visible
and he can make no progress in that him had said the
same. The
little
human animal
Himself.
Road.
must be
trained
to
and hatred
feel
pleasure,
liking,
disgust,
every
It is
It is
speak
all
predi-
was before the Creator
Nature,
is
it
the W^ay, the
the W^ay in which the universe
man
that cosmic
conforming
In the Republic, the well-nurtured
a just distaste
the reality beyond
Way
space and time.
which really disgusting, and hate-
youth is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with ugly
also
in
which things everand tranquilly, into also the Way which
lastingly emerge, stilly
at those things
are pleasant, likeable, ful. ^^
It is
goes on, the
will not at It
have the right responses.
The Chinese
cates, the abyss that
science. ^3 Plato before
first
it.^^
of a great thing (the greatest thing) called
or 'just sentiments' will easily
affections'
It is
should tread in imitation of
and supercosmic progression, all activities
emplar. ^^ 'In
ritual,'
to that great ex-
say the Analects,
'it
harmony with Nature that is prized.' ^^ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law is
would blame and hate the his earliest years and
as
even from
being
'true.'^^
This conception in
would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle
all its
forms, Platonic,
Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, alike, I shall
simply as 'the Tao.'
he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he
and Oriental
henceforth refer to for brevity
Some
of the accounts
heart. All this before
16 A. B. Keith, s.v. 'Righteousness (Hindu).' Enc. Religion and Ethics, vol. x. 17 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 454 b; iv. 12 b; ix. 87 a. 18 The Analects of Confucius, trans. Arthur Waley, London, 1938, i. 12. 19 Psalm cxix. 151. The word is emeth, 'truth.' Where the Satya of the Indian sources emphasizes truth as 'correspondence,' emeth (connected with a verb that means 'to be firm') emphasizes rather the
bears to her.'^^ In early Hinduism that
10 Centuries of Meditations, 11
12 13 14 15
De
Civ. Dei, xv. 22;
i.
12.
GBWW,
Vol. 18, p. 416c. Cf. ibid., ix. 5. (p. 288b), xi. 28. (p. 338b). Eth. Nic., 1104 B 11; Vol. 9, p. 350a. Ibid., 1095 B 4; p. 340c. Laws, 653; Vol. 7, p. 653a-b. Republic, 402 a; p. 333c.
or trustworthiness of truth. Faithfulness and permanence are suggested by Hebraists as alternative renderings. Emeth is that which does not deceive, does not 'give,' does not change, that which holds water. (See T. K. Cheyne in Encyclopedia Biblica, 1914, s.v. 'Truth.') reliability
GBWW,
GBWW,
507
I
Great Books Library which
beyond the emotion
is what Gains and from every sentence containing a predicate of value. Such statements, for them, refer solely to the emotion. Now the emotion, thus considered by itself, cannot be either in agreement or disagreement with Reason. It is irrational not as a paralogism is irrational, but as a
have quoted will seem, perof you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. of
it
It
I
many
haps, to
Titius exclude
the doctrine of objective value, the
is
belief that certain attitudes are really true,
and others
really
we
to
false,
kind of
the
and the kind of things Those who know the Tao can hold
thing the universe are.
is
physical
men
that to call children delightful or old
rise
On
this
and the world of feelings without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.
which demands a
response from us whether I
small
of value,
certain
we make
it
or
Hence the educational problem
myself do not enjoy the society of
because
children:
within the Tao
myself— just
nize that he
I
I
from
speak
different according as
man may have
to recog-
is
and disap-
approvals
provals are thus recognitions of objective
value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in har-
reason (when we feel liking what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No
mony with for
emotion
in itself, a
is,
judgement:
in that
and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason sense
all
emotions
or fail to conform.
The heart never
the place of the head: should, obey
but
it
But
latter
by 'suggeswhich their
this will
become
if we Roman
clearer
When was
a
a sweet
father told his son that
it
seemly thing to die for
his country,
speak not only of shoes
He was giving boy the best he had, giving of his spirit to humanize him as he had given of his body to beget him. But Gains and
something
Titius cannot believe that in calling such
discerned in noble death.
appropriate or ordinate to
besides the emotion:
feet.
The
and he believed what he said. He was communicating to the son an emotion which he himself shared and which he believed to be in accord with the value which his judgement
the reality, and thus to speak of something
but of
a mirage
take a concrete instance.
even unreasonable— has been excluded from the outset. It can be reasonable or unreasonable only if it conforms or fails to conform to something else. To say that the cataract is sublime means saying that our emotion
to
or 'ordinacy.*
reason has successfully dissipated.
Perhaps
of a sentiment being reasonable— or
fits is
'justness'
tion' or incantation
own
that a shoe
the pupil those responses
process of creating in others
and
it.
is
in
course involves them in the questionable
Over against this stands the world of The Green Book. In it the very possibility
of humility
train
to
trinsic
takes
can,
or
which are in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists. Those without, if they are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally nonrational, as mere mists between us and the real objects. As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil's mind: or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their in-
tone deaf or colour blind.
our
wholly
is
you stand within
without the Tao. For those within, the task
recognize this as a defect
as a
is
And because
else
does not
it
fact about our own parental or emotions at the moment, but to recog-
nize a quality
in
irrational:
view, the world of facts, without one trace
is
logical
not.
is
to the dignity of error.
not simply to record a psycho-
venerable
filial
event
even
just
this reference to
as
to
the
say
508
y
Man
Lewis: The Abolition of a death sweet and seemly they would be saying 'something important about some-
the
matter alone and
get
on with the
business of debunking.
thing.' Their own method of debunking would cry out against them if they attempted to do so. For death is not something to eat and therefore cannot be dulce in the literal sense, and it is unlikely that
But
this
not
less
is
course, though less inhuman,
disastrous
than the opposite
alternative of cynical propaganda. Let us
dulce even by analogy. And as for decorum —that is only a word describing how some
suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without
other people will feel about your death
the aid of trained emotions the intellect
the real sensations preceding
it
will
be
which won't be often, and will certainly do you no good. There are only two courses open to Gains and Titius. Either they must go the whole way and debunk this sentiment like any other, or must set themselves to work to produce, from outside, a sentiment which they believe to be of no value to the pupil and which may cost him his
when they happen
to think of
is
it,
gentleman does not an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought
new merely
'conditions.'
pupils as
grown birds
its
when they
deal with young birds
them
the
as
new
to fly: the
In a word, the old
teach
chest— the
the
new
is
nothing.
to
is
alternative.
first
own philosophy demning
it
(or
Propaganda
not because
their
gives a ground for con-
anything
else)
but because
they are better than their principles.
of
Alanus
emotions
They
called
Men
and good
to
ciently
commended
they would
20 Republic,
call 'rational' or 'biological' or
'modern' grounds, necessary.
as
be suffithe pupil on what
justice could
to
In
if it
354b. 21 Alanus
should ever become
the meantime,
Magby sentiments. The of
organized
they leave
Prosa,
509
It is
an outrage
commonly spoken of Intellectuals. This gives them the chance say that he who attacks them attacks
that they should be
and
not
reluctant
tells us,
without Chests.
probably have some vague notion (I will examine it in my next lecture) that valour faith
is
it
the
Chest— Magnanimity— Sentiment— these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be
men:
merely propaganda. that Gains and Titius
abomination:
their
seat, as
trained habit into stable
It is to their credit
embrace the
battle
keep
sentimentalism
nanimity,2i
of propaga-
tion—men transmitting manhood
In
bombardment. The crud(such as Gains and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element.' 20 The head rules the belly through the
them more with young
know
was a kind
will
third hour of the
est
birds— making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds
that
nerves and muscles to their post in the
deals with
poultry-keeper deals
'a
against
sharpers.
syllogisms
If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the
old dealt with
than
up among
because it is useful to us (the survivors) that our young men should feel it.
The
that
believe
to
cheat,'
life,
old initiated, the
powerless against the animal organism.
had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred I
ab iii.
442
B.C.;
Insulis.
GBWW, De
Vol.
Planctu
7,
p.
Naturae
Great Books Library Intelligence.
It
not
is
so.
distinguished from other usual
They
But it has not yet come There are theoretical difficulties in the philosophy of Gains and Titius. However subjective they may be about some traditional value. Gains and Titius have shown by the very act of writing The Green Book that there must be some other values about which they are not subjective at all. They write in order to produce but
are not
men by any
un-
to
finding truth nor any virginal
skill in
ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual
honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gains and
debunk
Titius could
as easily as
any other.
not excess of thought but defect of
It is
certain states of
and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than
tion,
fertile
the ordinary:
it is
of
the atrophy of the chest
beneath that makes them seem so. And all the time— such is the
clamour
for
we
is
more
are
without coming across the
'drive,' or
dynamism, or
self-sacri-
or 'creativity.' In a sort of ghastly
simplicity
we remove
the organ and de-
We
make men without
mand
the function.
chests
and expect of them virtue and enterWe laugh at honour and are shocked
prise.
our midst.
to find traitors in
and bid the geldings be
We
in the rising genera-
intrinsically just or good, yet cer-
to
some
them to be the which they would not be diflB-
state of society It
from various passages in The Green Book what their ideal is. But we need not. The important point is not the precise nature of their end, but the fact that they have an end at all. They must have, or their book (being purely practical in intention) is written to no purpose. And this end must have real value in their eyes. To abstain from calling it 'good' and to cult
statement that what our civilization needs
fice,
mind
regard as desirable.
rendering impossible. You can hardly open periodical
mind
not because they think those states
tainly because they think
tragi-
of our situation— we continue to
a
if
means
comedy
those very qualities
in the light] .22
that.
to
collect
use, instead, such predicates as 'necessary'
or 'progressive' or 'efficient'
castrate
subterfuge.
ment
fruitful.
to
would be
They could be forced by
a
argu-
answer the questions 'necessary
for
what?', 'progressing towards what?', 'effect-
ing what?'; in the last resort they would
admit that some state of affairs opinion good for its own sake. And this time they could not maintain that 'good' simply described their own emotions about it. For the whole purpose of
have
was 2.
THE WAY It is
upon the Trunk that a gentleman works
-ANALECTS OF CONFUCIUS,
their
to
in their
book
1,2
and
result of education in the The practical of The Green Book must be the
this
is
true doctrine might be a doctrine
was
in
some way
valid or
Gains and Titius will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values correct. In actual fact
it.
not necessarily a refutation of
subjectivism about values as a theory.
would be either a fool's or a undertaking unless they held that
their approval
spirit
But
condition the young
to
this
villain's
destruction of the society which accepts
so
is
reader that he will share their approval,
to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period be-
The
which happened
which
if we accept we die. No one who speaks from within the Tao could reject it on that account; en de phaei kai olesson [kill us,
22
510
Iliad, xvii.
647;
GBWW,
Vol. 4, p. 128d.
Man
Lewis: The Abolition of shows
tween the two wars.^^ Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people's values: about the values
decorum and greater love hath no man as mere irrational sentiments which are to be stripped vator in values regards dulce et
own set they are not nearly sceptical enough. And this phenomenon is very usual. A great many of those who 'decurrent in their
bunk' traditional or 'sentimental' values
(as
have
in the
background
they believe to
23 The real (perhaps unconscious) philosophy of Gaius and Titius becomes clear if we contrast the two following lists of disapprovals and approvals. A. Disapprovals: A mother's appeal to a child to be 'brave' is 'nonsense' {Green Book, p. 62). The refer-
'Unless
when
it is
mean
may
live.
of us risk death
But that
number
true
it
very true.
will
He may all
say
of us are
be true only
of cases; and even
provokes the very reason-
employed by in debunking (that is, the connecting by inference of propositions, ultimately derived from the process
Gaius and Titius
to meet when they are obvious to need mentioning' will be seen that comfort and
suburban
is
'Why should I be one of those who take the risk?' At this point the Innovator may ask why, after all, selfishness should be more 'rational' or 'intelligent' than altruism. The question is welcome. If by Reason we
'too
a
some men
that the death of
able counter-question
and pleasanter
to
some
certain to die.'
healthy' (p. 86). The reason for bathrooms ('that people are healthier
known
is
in a limited
we know,
as
meant
useful to other men. That
to die that others
ence of the word 'gentleman' is 'extremely vague' (ibid.). 'To call a man a coward tells us really nothing about what he does' (p. 64). Feelings about a country or empire are feelings 'about nothing in particular' (p. 77). B. Approvals: Those who prefer the arts of peace to the arts of war (it is not said in what circumstances) are such that 'we may want to call them wise men' (p. 65). The pupil is expected 'to believe in a democratic community life' (p. 67). 'Contact with the ideas of other people
142). It
sacrifice to
But on what ground are some men being asked to die for the benefit of others? Every appeal to pride, honour, shame, or love is excluded by hypothesis. To use these would be to return to sentiment and the Innovator's task is, having cut all that away, to explain to men, in terms of pure reasoning, why they will be well advised
martyrdom the only virtue, but because is the experimentum cruets which
(p.
such
not useful to the community— only the death of some of its members. What is
this
security,
utility of
is
really
is
to the
community. 'Good,' he might say, 'means what is useful to the community.' But of course the death of the community
is
clean')
down
the
Let us continue to use the previous example—that of death for a good cause— not, of course, because virtue is the only value
as
get
or 'basic'
value lay in the
attempted.
is,
we may
ground of this value. Where will he find such a ground? First of all, he might say that the real
'realistic'
be immune from the debunking process. They claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that 'real' or 'basic' values may emerge. I will now try to find out what happens if this is seriously
or
order that
off in
they would say)
own which
values of their
different systems of thought in the
clearest light. Let us suppose that an Inno-
actually
when engaged
sense data, with further propositions), then
street
the answer must be that a refusal to sacri-
peace-time, are the ultimate values: those things which can alone produce or spiritualize comfort and security are mocked. Man lives by bread alone, and the ultimate source of bread is the baker's van: peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers. in
fice oneself is
sent to
choice
From
do is
so.
no more rational than a con-
And no
less rational.
rational— or
Neither
irrational— at
all.
about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to
511
propositions
do this except by the mediation of society ought to he preserved. This will cost xjoii your life cannot lead directly to do not do can lead to
this: it
it
only through a
desire or an
acknowledged duty of
preservation.
The Innovator
is
simply the Tao which he has set out to supersede.
found
we have debunked. The take the ciples
first
known
all
all
in Instinct.
individual
The
preservation of so-
life:
that
is
why
scruples
of
and humanity— in fact the Too— can be properly swept avv^ay when they conflict
with our real end, the preservation
of the
the sentiments
modern
Innovator will not
men by Reason
and
justice
new
alternative, for practical printo
'basic'
and of the species itself, are ends that do not hang on the precarious thread of Reason: they are given by Instinct. That is why there is no need to argue against the man who does not acknowledge them. We have an instinctive urge to preserve our own species. That is why men ought to work for posterity. We have no instinctive urge to keep promises or to respect
the attempt to find a core of
value behind
up the
ciety,
and though he continues trying to all he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to he preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gains and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself: or else we must give up at once, and ever,
likely to give
This he will probably feel that he has
mood
eternity
for
more
'realistic'
out of premisses in the indicative mood:
'rational'
is
some other ground even more
felt self-
trying to
get a conclusion in the imperative
He
quest for a 'rational' core and to hunt for
some
are
512
species.
That, again,
situation permits
is
why
the
and demands a
sexual morality: the old taboos served real
purpose
in
helping to preserve
Lewis: The Abolition of
Man
the species, but contraceptives have modi-
we must obey
instinct, that
and we can now abandon many of the taboos. For of course sexual desire, being instinctive, is to be gratified when-
otherwise? But
if so,
fied this
ever
and the
tion of the species. It looks, in fact, as
if
help going?
on instinct will give the Innohe wants and nothing that he
all
does not want. In reality step.
will
I
Instinct (to
a
is
say
we have not
not advanced one
on the point that
insist
name
for
we know
migratory
that
birds
way by instinct is only to not know how migratory way), for
I
think
it is
the
say that
birds find their
mean an
way does
if
by what
that
maintained that
it
24 The most determined
effort
which I know on the basis
of 'satisfaction of impulses' is that of Dr. I. A. Richards (Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924).
The
old objection to defining
is
the universal value judgement that 'it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.' To meet this Dr. Richards endeavours to show that our impulses can be arranged in a hierarchy and some satisfactions preferred to others without an appeal to any criterion other than satisfaction. He does this by the doctrine that some impulses are more 'important' than others— an important impulse being one whose fmstration involves the frustration of other impulses. A good systematization (i.e. the
good
as
life)
Satisfaction
consists
in
as
scheme seem
The
me
objections
surely,
frustration
to
be two.
to
of
all
many
it
are dead. It looks very
the Innovator would have to
if
we must obey
will satisfy us to to
obey
do
so,
nor
instinct,
but that
we
instinct.^^
that of the
and
dead man
in
whom
satis-
dissatisfactions
with ordinary crudities! (op. cit., p. 230). The only trace I find of a philosophical basis for this preference is the statement that 'the more complex an activity the more conscious it is' (p. 109). But if satis-
this
(1)
his
who
satisfied, and that B has 1,200 impulses whereof 700 are satisfied and 500 not: which has the better systematization? There is no doubt which Dr. Richards actually prefers— he even praises art on the ground that it makes us 'discontented'
Without a theory of immortality it leaves no room for the value of noble death. It may, of course, be said that a man who has saved his life by treachery will suffer for the rest of that life from fmstration. But not, to
cannot
(on the modern view) both equal zero, as against the successful traitor who can still eat, drink, sleep, scratch, and copulate, even if he cannot have friendship or love or selfrespect. But it arises at other levels. Suppose A has only 500 impulses and all are
impulses as possible; which entails satisfying the 'important' at the expense of the 'unimportant.'
stream of
we
such praise for those
when we
as
factions
is
satisfying
this
has no unsatisfied impulses he is better off than the disgraced and living man? This at once raises the second objection. (2) Is the value of a systematization to be judged by the presence of satisfactions or the absence of dissatisfactions? The extreme case
to construct a theory of value
Value
all,
ought
Instinct, thus conceived, help us
to find 'rear values? Is
Why
say not that
felt
of a given species. In
at
much
unreflec-
spontaneous impulse widely
members
their
we do
here being used in a
fairly definite sense, to
tive or
not what find
Why
cannot do Green Books
have submitted to the inevitable? Or is it maintained that if we do obey instinct we shall be happy and satisfied? But the very question we are considering was that of facing death which (so far as the Innovator knows) cuts off^ every possible satisfaction: and if we have an instinctive desire for the good of posterity then this desire, by the very nature of the case, can never be satisfied, since its aim is achieved,
an
ethics based
vator
like written?
we
are
exhortation to drive us where
does not conflict with the preserva-
it
why
only value, why should consciousness be good? For consciousness is the condition of all dissatisfactions as well as of all satisfactions. Dr. Richards' system gives no support to his (and our) actual preference for civil life over savage and human over animal— or even for life over death. faction
increase
impulses?
Whereas the dead man will have no satisfaction. Or is it maintained that since he
513
is
of
the
Great Books Library But why ought we
to
obey
we
instinct? Is
can yet find grounds for preferring one above its fellows dies very hard.
there another instinct of a higher order
instinct
directing us to do so, and a third of a
We
still
higher order directing us to obey it?— an regress of instincts? This
infinite
sumably impossible, but nothing
From
serve.
logical fact
pre-
is
these words
else will
have an impulse
to
do
and
so
Even
impulse.'
if
it
cord
own
were true that men
lives for the preservation
latter,
this
have
to
be
admission surely
in-
or
avail. Either
a value
judgement
it,
or else they merely re-
intensity, the
frequency of
its
its
these observations about the quanti-
no practical conclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the premisses already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative. Finally, it is worth inquiry whether there is any instinct to care for posterity or pre-
For even the Innovator admits that many
And
the
to
impulses (those which conflict with the controlled.
no
it
tative aspects of a psychological event lead
it
preservation of the species)
of
call
'primal,'
wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the
remains a quite separate question whether this is an impulse they should control or one they should indulge. of their fellows,
its felt
operation, and
a spontaneous, unreflective impulse to
sacrifice their
conceal
derivable from
cannot by any ingenuity derive the practical principle *I ought to obey this
had
is
we
or
passed upon the instinct and therefore not
the statement about psycho-
'I
'fundamental,'
or
'deepest' instinct. It
we
so'
grasp at useless words:
'basic,'
2'''
troduces us to a yet more fundamental
serve the species.
I
do not discover
it
in
difficulty.
Telling us to obey instinct
us to obey things:
do
so
at war.
is
like telling
25 The desperate expedients to which a man can be driven if he attempts to base value on fact are well illustrated by Dr. C. H. Waddington's fate in Science and Ethics.
people.' People say different instincts.
If it is
Our
instincts
are
held that the instinct for
obeyed
at the
expense of other
istence
instincts,
own
cause and deciding in its own would be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim
be
By
gratified at the
expense of
all
the
rest.
the very act of listening to one rather
than to others the case. If
we
we have
(a)
ley's
did not bring to the exami-
you
be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged: or, if he is, the
itself
is
worthless
and
there
is
no
for placing the preservation of the
species
above self-preservation or sexual
appetite.
The
explains
that
'ex-
justification' (p. 14),
and
later stages include or earlier, (b)
'com-
That T. H. Hux-
picture of Evolution will not revolt
you regard it from an 'actuarial' point of view, (c) That, any way, after all, it isn't half so bad as people make out ('not so morally offensi\e that we cannot accept it'; p. 18). These three palliatives are more creditable to Dr. Waddington's heart than his head and seem to me to give up the main position. If Evolution is praised (or, at least, apologized for) on the ground of any properties it exhibits, then we are using an external standard and the attempt to make existence its own justification has been abandoned. If tliat attempt is maintained, why does Dr. Waddington
comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot
ground
That the
prehend' the
already prejudged
nation of our instincts a knowledge of their
decision
own
'An existence which is essentially evolutionary is itself the justification for an evolution towards a more comprehensive existence' (p. 17). I do not think Dr. Waddington is himself at ease in this view, for he does endeavour to recommend the course of evolution to us on three grounds other than its mere occurrence.
favour to
is its
writes:
whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its
Waddington here
Dr.
preserving the species should always be
idea that, without appealing to any
court higher than the instincts themselves.
514
if
i
Lewis: The Abolition of I am a man rather prone remote futurity— a man who can read Mr. Olaf Stapledon with dehght. Much less do I find it easy to beheve that the majority of people who have sat opposite me in buses or stood with me in queues feel an unreflective impulse to do anything
myself:
and yet
thetical descendants against those of the
baby actually crowing and kicking in the room. Those of us who accept the Tao may, perhaps, say that they ought to do so: but that is not open to those who treat instinct as the source of value. As we pass from mother love to rational planning for the future we are passing away from the realm of instinct into that of choice and reflection: and if instinct is the source of
to think of
at all
about the species, or posterity. Only
people educated in a particular
way have
ever had the idea 'posterity' before their
minds instinct
at
all.
our
It
is
difficult
attitude
to
towards
value, planning for the future ought to be
assign to
an
Man
object
less
which exists only for reflective men. What we have by nature is an impulse to preserve our own children and grandchildren; an impulse which grows progressively feebler as the imagination looks forward and finally dies out in the 'deserts of vast futurity.' No parents who were guided by this instinct would dream for a moment of setting up the claims of their hypo-
respectable and less obligatory than
the baby language and cuddling of the
fondest mother or the most fatuous nursery
anecdotes of a doting father. are the substance
the
screen of the
unknown
say this projection
concentrate on Evolution: i.e. on a temporary phase of organic existence in one planet? This is 'geocentric' If Good "whatever Nature happens to be doing," then surely we should notice what Nature is doing as a whole; and nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe, so that Dr. Waddington's ethics, stripped of
shadow
is
do not believe that
a
future.
bad
I
do not
thing: but then
instinct
What
is
is
the ground
absurd
is
to its
in instinct and then flout at every turn the only instinct on which it could be supposed to rest, tearing the child
almost from the breast to creche and kindergarten in the interests of progress and the coming race.
The
truth finally
becomes apparent that
neither in any operation with factual prop-
parochial affair as tellurian biology, would leave murder and suicide our only duties. Even this, I confess, seems to me a lesser objection than the discrepancy between Dr. Waddington's first principle and the value judgments men actually make. To value anything simply because it occurs is in fact to worship success, like Quislings or men of Vichy. Other philosophies more wicked have been devised: none more vulgar. I am far from .suggesting that Dr. Waddington practises in real life such grovelling prostration before the fait accompli. Let us hope that Rasselas, cap. 22, gives the right picture of what his philosophy
ositions nor in
any appeal
to instinct
can
the Innovator find the basis for a system of values.
None
of the principles he re-
quires are to be found there: but they are all to
be found somewhere
else. 'All
the four seas are his brothers'
(xii.
within 5) says
Confucius of the Chiin-tzu, the cuor gentil or gentleman. Humani nihil a me alienum puto says the Stoic. 'Do as you would be
done by' says
Jesus.
'Humanity
is
to
be
preserved' says Locke. ^^ All the practical principles behind the Innovator's case for posterity,
('The philosopher rose up and departed with the air of a man that had cooperated with the present system.') in
for posterity
flickering
justification
unaccountable bias towards such a
to
are to
claim that your care for posterity finds
=
amounts
we
happiness cast upon the
of the nursery
I
and care
shadow— the huge,
of value judgements.
their
If
base ourselves upon instinct, these things
action.
or society,
or the
species,
are
there from time immemorial in the Tao.
26 See Appendix.
515
Great Books Library But they are nowhere
what
Unless you
else.
title
he has
to select bits of
the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever. You cannot reach
have those he tains
valid,
is
retains:
what he
them as conclusions: they are premisses. You may, since they can give no 'reason'
valid too.
for themselves of a kind to silence
the claims of posterity.
The
Gains and Titius, regard them as sentiments: but then you must give up contrasting 'real' or
pain
(on
confess
abandoning
of
sentiment
all
regard them as rational— nay as rationality things
itself— as
obviously reasonable
so
that they neither
demand nor admit
proof.
But then you must allow that Reason can be practical, that an ought must not be dismissed because it cannot produce some is as its credential. If
nothing
nothing nothing
be
can
proved.
obligatory
is is
nothing for
obligatory at
To some
Similarly, its
own
modem
may
vator
cannot get any
sense) reason.
He
place economic value
get people fed and clothed
self-evident,
is
He
really
is
axiom of Practical Reason, and our duty to do good to our descendants is a clear deduction from it. But then, in every form of the Tao which has come down to us, side by side with the duty to children and descendants lies the duty to parents and ancestors. By what right do we reject one and accept the other? Again, the Inno-
every
You may, on the other hand,
subjective.
re-
equally
is
Innovator, for example, rates high
the
(in
not 'merely'
is
what he
if
rejects
deriving our duty to posterity from the Tao; our duty to do good to all men is an
value will be sentimental; and you must value) that
for
valid claim for posterity out of instinct or
value with sentimental value. All
'rational'
it
acceptance and to reject others. For if the bits he rejects have no authority, neither
accept these without question as being to
end, and in pursuit of
if
it
is
first.
To
the great
scruples about
and good faith may be set aside. The Tao of course agrees with him about justice
sake,
all.
appear that I have merely restored under another name what they always meant by basic or fundamental instinct. But much more than a choice of words is involved. The Innovator attacks traditional values (the Tao) in defence of what he at first supposes to be (in some
and clothed. Unless the Innovator were himself using the Tao he could never have learned of such a duty. But side by side with it in the Tao lie those duties of justice and good faith which he is ready to debunk. What is his warrant? He may be a
special sense) 'rational' or 'biological' val-
Jingoist, a Racialist,
it
the importance of getting the people fed
will
But as we have seen, all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao, and even claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from the Tao. If he had really started from scratch, from right outside the human tradition of value, no jugglery could have advanced him an inch towards the conception that a man should ues.
ist,
his
else
If
give
him
more, he
to yield.
object to which all But no kind of factual
community or work for posterTao falls, all his own concepvalue fall with it. Not one of them
in
is
fact deriving
own
kin,
Tao, and limiting of justice,
men
own is
morality. But side
mands
kin,
from the because they it
a part of traditional
by side with it,
lie
and the rule
the Tao. Only by such shreds of the
comes the Innovator's authority and choose? Since I can see no answer
as
he has inherited
attack
it.
The
is
he enabled even
question
therefore
to
arises
516
in the
that, in the
long run,
all
it
the inflexible de-
can claim any authority other than that of
Tao
Once
a ground for this opinion.
Tao: a duty to our are our
the
tions of
ought
the advancement of
observation and no appeal to instinct will
die for the ity.
an extreme national-
who maintains that own people is the
are our brothers.
Whence to
to
pick these
Lewis: The Abolition of questions, (
draw the following conclu-
I
This thing which
development, is required. But there are two very different kinds of criticism.
have called for convenience the Tao, and which others sions.
may
call
the
or
ity
Natural
Law
I
It is
alue
its idiom and spelling in the commercial convenience or scientific accuracy. That is one thing. A great poet, who has 'loved, and been well nurtured in, his mother tongue,' may also make great alterations in it, but his changes of the language are made in the spirit of the language itself: he works from within. The language which suffers, has also inspired, the changes. That is a different thing— as different as the works of Shakespeare are from Basic English. It is the difference between alteration from within and alteration from without: between the organic and the surgical.
it
and
place
raise a
is
is
rejected. If
The
retained.
it is
alterations of
value judgements.
all
rejected, all value
retained,
is
new system
any
effort
of value
self-contradictory.
There
new judgement of value in the history What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideolocally
of the world.
fragments from the Tao wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity gies,' all consist of
arbitrarily
as
they possess.
ents
is
a
If
my
superstition,
duty to my parthen so is my
In the same way, the Tao admits development from within. There is a difference between a real moral advance and a mere innovation. From the Confucian 'Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you' to the Christian 'Do as you would be done by' is a real advance. The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. The first is an advance because no one who did not admit the validity of the
duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowl-
edge
is
a real value, then so
fidelity.
The
rebellion
against
the
Tao
is
of
a
conjugal
is
new
ideologies
rebellion
of
the
branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they
had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a
old
new
old
value than of imagining a
new
pri-
our perceptions of value can ever take
we are bound down for ever to an unchanging code given once for all?
place? That
And
is it, in any event, possible to talk of obeying what I call the Tao? If we lump together, as I have done, the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew, shall we not find
many
contradictions
maxim could
new
see reason for accepting
who accepted the once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle. If he rejected it, he would have to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as something simply heterogeneous from his own ideas of value. But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as the
mary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in. Does this mean, then, that no progress in
of
interests
never has been, and never will be, a radi-
itself,
genius as
a series of possible systems of value.
is
its
its
it
claim on him and advocating wholesale
to refute in
regarding
may approach were from outside, a thing that has no
about language
not one
the sole source of
If it is \
theorist
his native tongue, as
Practical
of
Reason or the First Platitudes,
among
A
or Traditional Moral-
Principles
First
Man
a
one, and anyone
would
mere
at
and then to put ourselves in where we can find no ground
error
a position
any value judgements at all. It is the between a man who says to us: 'You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?' and a man who says, for
difference
and some absurdities?
admit all this. Some criticism, some removal of contradictions, even some real I
517
Great Books Library 'Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.' Those who understand the spirit of the Tao and who have been led by that spirit can modify it in directions which that spirit itself demands. Only they can know what those directions are. The outsider knows nothing about the matter. His attempts at alteration, as we have seen, contradict themselves. So far from being able to harmonize discrepancies in its letter by penetration to its spirit, he merely snatches at some one precept, on which the accidents of time and place happen to have riveted his attention, and then rides it to death— for no reason that he can give. From within the Tao itself comes the only authority to modify the Tao. This is what Confucius meant when he said 'With those it is
who
follow a different
useless to take counsel.' ^7 This
Aristotle
said that only those
is
be a matter of some delicacy to decide where the legitimate internal criticism ends and the fatal external kind begins. But wherever any precept of traditional moral-
;
ity
ing point of this science
he does not know what This that
is
why
it
is
was
is
to
some precept which
de-
its
ment
of value
does
it
embody. The 'Why?'—'What good
professes to
it
direct frontal
attack
do?'— 'Who said
missible; not because sive but because
so?'
it
is
no values
themselves on that
never per-
is
harsh or
off^en-
can
justify
at all
level.
If
you
persist
in that
kind of
Way
values,
and so destroy the bases of your
why
own
invisible. ^^
is
with
trial
you
will destroy all
as well as the thing criti-
criticism
You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao. Nor must we postpone cized.
obedience to a precept until its credentials have been examined. Only those who are practising the Tao will understand it. It is the well-nurtured man, the cuor gentil, and he alone, who can recognize Reason when
He
critical:
it
comes. 31
man
accursed' ^^
and
'He that believeth not shall be damned.' ^^ An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else. In particular instances it may, no doubt,
It
'perfect
learns
Paul, the Pharisee,
is
as
touching the Law'
the
who
where and how that Law was de-
ficient. ^^
In order to avoid misunderstanding,
may add
I
though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about that
to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies
these,
27 Analects of Confucius, xv, 39. 28 Eth. Nic, 1095 b, 1104 b, 1151 a; Vol. 9, pp. 340c, 350a, 402a. 29 John vii. 49. The speaker said
GBWW,
a it
supernatural
origin
for
the
Tao
is
a
in malice,
but with more truth than he meant. Cf.
John 30 Mark
xi.
31 Republic, 402 a;
51.
xvi.
'
fenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judge-
being discussed.
Law
taken the wrong posiThe legitimate reformer endeavours show that the precept in question con-
flicts
also said 'This people
knoweth not the
we have
it,
tion.
who have
but he cannot be
hostile,
its
though the burden of proof
credentials, as
stands outside the Tao, the very start-
may be
simply challenged to produce
is
lay on
been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man
who
!
32
16.
518
Phil.
iii.
6.
GBWW,
Vol. 7, p. 333c.
;
|
Man
Lewis: The Abolition of I am not here concerned with. how can the modern mind be expected to embrace the conclusion we have reached? This Too which, it seems, we
question
3.
must
came burning hot into my mind^ whatever he said and however he flattered, when he got me to his house, he would sell me for a slave It
simply a phe-
an absokite is any other— the
treat as
nomenon
THE ABOLITION OF MAN
Yet
reflection
like
upon the minds of our ancestors of the agricultural rhythm in which they lived
— BUNYAN
even of their physiology. We know already in principle how such things are or
produced: soon eventually
we
we shall
shall
know
be able
Man's
in detail:
to
produce
progress
them at will. Of course, while we did not know how minds were made, we accepted
matter,' he said,
which has hitherto been man? You threaten
outside that
it:
but
way by
disaster
we have been
if
we
\
clear that
threatened in
that
obscurantists at every step in
false.
alues at
all
You say we if
we
shall
all
and
doing what
we
is
is
lecture to consider
I
shall
conquest,'
much
less
In a civilized community,
who can pay
for
in
them
may
use these things. But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is exercising his own proper or individual power over Nature. If I pay you to carry me, I am not therefore myself a strong man. Any or all of the three things I have mentioned
men by other who sell, or those who allow those who own the sources of or those who make the goods.
can be withheld from some
half-hearted
those
the sale, or
production,
What we
call Man's power is, in reality, power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to
the rejection of the concept
of value altogether.
it
the possessor of increasing
peace-time, anyone
to
sceptics who still hope to find 'real' values when they have debunked the traditional
ones. This
make
to disparage all
Let us consider three typical examples:
men— by
the
'Man's
Man
self-contradiction
like
order to
do not wish
the aeroplane, the wireless, and the con-
like. is
are casualties
power over Nature?
traceptive.
what man
I
as
Let be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny. This is a very possible position: and those who hold it cannot be accused of start
I'm one of the
the real devotion and self-sacrifice that
sense
chological survival: let us step right out of that
know
has gone to make it possible. But having done so I must proceed to analyse this conception a little more closely. In what
have no
Very well: we shall probably find that we can get on quite comfortably without them. Let us regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as an interesting psyall
to a friend
really beneficial in the process de-
is
scribed
step outside the Tao.
us decide for ourselves
'I
point of departure in
step
our advance, and each time the threat has
proved
the
has
on the winning as well as on the losing side. But that doesn't alter the fact that it is winning.' I have chosen this story as my
called the conscience of
some obscure
an expres-
'Man
science.
Of course there
casualties.
conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest
us with
is
describe
mine not long ago. In their context the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the speaker was dying of tuberculosis. 'No
mental furniture as a datum, even as But many things in nature which were once our masters have become our servants. Why not this? Why must our
'nature'
applied
of
to
Nature whacked' said someone
a master.
of
used
often
of
this
bit
conquest of Nature'
sion
need another
a
it.
519
Great Books Library Again,
by.
profit
manifested
Man
less,
aeroplane or the wire-
much
as
is
the patient or sub-
ject as the possessor, since
he
as regards contraceptives, there
And
generations
future
By
alive.
patients
power wielded by those
or subjects of a
already
eration exercises
possi-
all
the
are
power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural
a para-
is
which
doxical, negative sense in
tended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each gen-
the target
is
both for bombs and for propaganda.
ble
power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race ex-
regards the powers
as
in the
contraception
simply,
they are denied existence; by contraception
used as a means of selective breeding,
they are, without their concurring voice,
made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man's
processes resulting in a continual increase
human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to of
power over Nature turns out to be a power some men over other men
make
with Nature as
men who
exercised by
It is, of
plain that
its
instrument.
course, a
commonplace
men have
and against
to
their fellows, the
am
I
speaking
of
I
is
not
am
not
corruptions
particular
cure:
am
I
and
thus attained
must always and
terity
considering what the
thing called 'Man's power over essentially be.
were
doubt,
And we must
ownership of and public control of scientific research. But unless we have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation over others. And even within the world
apart
by public raw materials and factories
state or the nation
power
ties,
and
(in
mean
will
And
all
(in prin-
power
of earlier generations over
point
is
not
always
the
dimensions.
In order to understand fully
what Man's
a
that, quite
generation
lives to that
date at
themselves exercise least power upon
The real picture is that of one dominant age— let us suppose the hundredth century a. d.— which resists all pre-
emphasized, because those who write on social matters have not yet learned to imitate the physicists by always
Time among
it
later
the future.
suffi-
ciently
including
remember
the
of all
will
latter
also
this,
far
must
later ones.
The
from
from being the heirs of power, will be men most subject to the dead hiind of the great planners and conditioners and
long-term exer-
in breeding,
over posage most emancipated
which the species becomes extinct— the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men,
of majorities over minori-
power, especially
the
mean
all
maximum power
comes— the nearer
the concrete) of a government
over the people. cises of
it
pleases,
are weaker, not stronger:
also the
the picture could be modified
ciple) the
it
are the patients of
from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors.
Nature'
No
They
it
though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had
abuses which an increase of moral virtue
would
live after
for
powers that
trying to make.
descendants what
that power.
hitherto used badly,
science has given them. But that
the point
com-
its
vious ages most successfully and dominates all
subsequent ages most irresistibly, and is the real master of the human
thus
520
t
Great Books Library master gen-
and Elyot would have the boy see no men
eration (itself an infinitesimal minority of
before the age of seven and, after that, no
species.
But even within
the species) the
by
power
a minority smaller
of Nature,
this
be exercised Man's conquest
will
still.
the dreams of
if
some
scientific
and how Locke wants children have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry34_we may well thank the beneficent women,"^'^ to
planners are realized, means the rule of a
obstinacy
few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In
and (above
every victory, besides being the general
who
triumphs, he
is
also the prisoner
who
am
I
of such
the conquest, which, perhaps,
is
stage is come when Man by by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based
on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself.
Human
part of Nature to
The battle will then be have 'taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho' and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, surrender to Man.
won.
the
We
shall
power
of
men what
some men
they please.
to
In
power
posterity in
we shall get at last a who really can cut out
what shape they please. The is even more important.
make all
will
him were prenorm to which the
producing
for
.
.
.
withdrawe him from all company of women.' 34 Sotne Thoughts concerning Education, § 7: 'I will also advise his Feet to be wash'd every Day in cold Water, and to have his Shoes so thin that they might leak and let in Water, whenever he comes near it.' § 174: 'If he have a poetick vein, 'tis to
other
ages,
man
Named the Governour, i. iv.: 'Al except physitions only shulde be excluded and kepte out of the norisery.' i. vi: 'After that a childe is come to seuen yeres of age the most sure counsaile is to
no
sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects.
place, the
technique:
men
some
first
still
33 The Boke
doubt, nurture and instruction have, in
In the
it
teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the
not far
final
last
scientific
race of conditioners
scribed by the Tao—a.
eugenics,
nature will be the
race in such sanity as
But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible
motives
a good thing or a bad.
The
nurses,
In the older systems both the kind of
clear
off.
real
the teachers wished to produce and their
ambivalent victories
I am only making what Man's conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in is
mothers,
real children for preserving
possesses.
all
not yet considering whether the
result
human
the
real
all)
second difference
follows the triumphal car.
total
of
me
be enorm-
the strangest thing in the World that the Father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks the Parents should labour to have it stifled and
ously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them— how Plato would have
suppressed as much as may be.' Yet Locke is one of our most sensible writers on edu-
every infant
cation.
'a
bastard nursed in a bureau,'
522
Lewis: The Abolition of
Man
pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever
any, they should produce.
Tao there
of
motive,
is
The
education.
of
No
conditioners
have been emancipated from all that. It is one more part of Nature which they have
comparison.
conquered. The ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something
ing a factitious difficulty for
They have surrendered— like
given.
tricity: it is
To some
to
may
the function of the Conditioners
are assuming the last stage of Man's
struggle
with
The
Nature.
Human
has been won.
final
ask
They
are, if
their
task
now
it
The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race. They are the motivators, the
by
survivals,
are they go-
within their
minds, of the old natural' Tao. Thus
at first
they
may
look
upon themselves
as
servants and guardians of humanity and
conceive that they have a 'duty' to do
it
But it is only by confusion that they can remain in this state. They recognize the concept of duty as the result of certain processes which they can now conTheir victory has consisted precisely
it
itself is
cannot also be the judge.
up
men who have
sacri-
share in traditional hu-
devote themselves to the
deciding what 'Humanity' shall
we
In the
first
really like the
all
and
posterity,
place,
same
it
is
things.
may have what we
Their duty? But that
is
like?
only the Tao, which
they may decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them. If they accept it, then they are no longer the makers of conscience but still its subjects, and their final conquest over Nature has not really happened.
The
preservation of
why should the species One of the questions before
the species? But
for trial:
And
like,
But even if we did, what motive is to impel the Conditioners to scorn delights and live laborious days in order that we,
emerging from the state in which they were acted upon by those processes to the state in which they use them as tools. One of the things they now have to decide is whether they will, or will not, so condition the rest of us that we can go on having the old idea of duty and the old reactions to it. How can duty help them
Duty
critics
is
false that
in
to decide that?
you
own
will not answer.
'good.'
trol.
Condi-
pose that it was possible to say 'After all, most of us want more or less the same things—food and drink and sexual intercourse, amusement, art, science, and the longest possible life for individuals and for the species. Let them simply say, This is what we happen to like, and go on to condition men in the way most likely to produce it. Where's the trouble?' But this
ing to be motivated themselves? For a
own
invent-
are words without content: for from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived. Nor is their difficulty factitious. We might sup-
bear.
time, perhaps,
am
my
henceforth mean. 'Good' and 'bad,' applied to them,
how
I
more simple-minded,
in order to
of
conquered— and, of course, has conquered, whatever sense those words may
But
appear that
'Why should you suppose they
ficed
manity
victory
nature has been
in
creators of motives.
will
will be such bad men?' But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all.
obey them. They know produce conscience and decide
what kind of conscience they will produce. They themselves are outside, above. For
we
it
tioners. Other,
elec-
to control, not to
how
conception
good can help them to decide. It is absurd to fix on one of the things they are comparing and make it the standard of
be the product, not the
will
be preserved? is whether
'good'
no better. They know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us. The question is which, if
them
fares
(they
know
well
be continued or
523
this feeling for posterity
how not.
it is
produced) shall far they go
However
Great Books Library back, or down, they can find no ground to stand on.
Every motive they
on becomes
at
events, will have
once a petitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the aboli-
I
now
that
I
act.
motives
all
When
fail
in us their subjects, they will yet perceive that it creates in us an illusion of meaning for our lives which
I
them,
failed them. Every-
this, for it is
motives except one.
away.
explained
to
is
immune from
is
scratch
when
itch or to pull to pieces
the
am
I
solvent
my justice, or honour, When all that says
fatal to
must come
is,
can
have no
Conditioners,
pleasure.
I
am
come, from chance. And Chance It is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas, that the motives of the Conditioners will spring. Their extreme rationas they
here means Nature.
their
power nor
pressing the fear that under tioners will degenerate.
it
ex-
our Condi-
The very words
alism,
corrupt and degenerate imply a doctrine of value
stand outside
My
all
point
is
that those
own
may
the Tao, or else
judgements of value can-
to
left
We
all 'rational'
hope that among the
or 'spiritual' motives,
through'
commit
(and
mere
all
them creatures you
is
obey obedience
will not
suicide,
therefore,
'nature')
'rational'
of wholly
in
the
long
the only course
open.
At the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely 'natural'— to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the mo-
impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of
impulse
run, to
impulses to another except the
legitimately
'seeing
irrational behaviour. If
who
not have any ground for preferring one of
emotional strength of that impulse.
by
motives, leaves
and are therefore meaningless
in this context.
Too— they
ground for promoting or
than any others. By the logic of their pothey must just take their impulses
not here speaking of
the corrupting influence of
not
sition
therefore,
be motivated simply by
is
stabilizing their benevolent impulses rather
It
The
to
What
without re-entering the
that
*it
cannot be exploded or 'seen through' because it never had any
pretensions.
conjecture.
that our
is
or
good' has been debunked, what says 1
want' remains.
mere
hope even of a 'conditioned' happiness rests on what is ordinarily called 'chance'— the chance that benevolent impulses may on the whole predominate in our Conditioners. For without the judgement 'Benevolence is good'— conjecture
But what never
care for posterity.
their
regard-
conscience
felt
inquisitive
own
Though
artificial
moment have
all
by subjectivism. The impulse
is
inclined to think that the Conditioners
ing as an illusion the
claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed
which
am
will hate the conditioned.
thing except the sic volo, sic jubeo has
I
very
compares favourably with the futility of their own: and they will envy us as eunuchs envy men. But I do not insist on
than that of their
when
am
I
whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.
All motives that claim
been
psychological
any validity other emotional weight at
should have said
a given
as
influence.
which they produce
Yet the Conditioners will said just
much
doubtful
Man.
tion of
and frequency
strength
try to act
some
be benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural will
524
ment
of
its
consummation, to be Nature's
conquest of Man. Every victory to
win has led All
conclusion.
us,
step
by
Nature's
we seemed
step, to this
apparent
re-
verses have been but tactical withdrawals.
We
we were
thought
when
beating her back
she was luring us on.
What
looked
hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive to us like
species that rose in revolt against her so
many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit [the wild conqueror has been taken captive]: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows cold. My point may be clearer to some if it is put in a different form. Nature is a word of varying meanings, which can best be understood if we consider its various oppoThe Natural
sites.
Artificial,
tual,
and the
now
does not
is
against the world of quality: of objects as
the opposite of the
Human, the SpiriSupernatural. The Artificial
the Civil, the
rest of the
concern
list
us. If
we
against
they oppose to her. Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from is
less fully so or
to
not so at
all.
be the world of quantity,
as
that
we can get a rough idea of what men have meant by Nature and what it is
what
bound,
of that
I
think
seems
the
of
which knows no values as against which both has and perceives value: of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against
take the
of opposites, however,
consciousness:
against the wholly or partially autonomous:
final causes.
Now
I
take
it
that
when we
understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own conve-
She
nience
as
525
we reduce
it
to the level of 'Nature'
Great Books Library in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of
The
stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can
This repression of elements in
quantity.
what would otherwise be our
psycho-analyse her.
total reac-
from Nature
ers
tion to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These
of things to Nature.
objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too,
ing our
a similar price
that primeval
Nature, the whole process
astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old oppoGalileo or to 'bodysnatchers'
to
simply obscurantism. But that
whole
story.
modern
It
scientists
not
is
who
the object, stripped of
wholly
unscientific
think
followers
The
so.
may well
that the object, so treated, abstraction,
has been
From
is
an
that something of
'conquer' them.
for
what we have,
some
is
treat a thing as
is
own judgements
'natural object'
of value as
at will.
The
in the fact that his point of
lie
that
We
the
extent,
conquered. The price of conquest
in
is
mere
raw
objection to his doing so does
day
view
if
man
in a dissecting
chooses to treat himself as
raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his dehumanized Conditioners.
are always con-
to
souls. It
to
not
is
new
We
be the which we Man's power
shall in fact
room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection
reality
quering Nature, because 'Nature'
his
(like one's first
view the conquest of light. We reduce mere Nature in order that we in a
We
material for scientific manipulation to alter
this point of
things to
name
and
artificial
its
up
our selves, have been
is,
to treat himself as a
lost.
Nature appears
may
have given our
of
science,
for
stood to gain and
and puppets of that
slaves
is
know very
of
mere
the magician's bargain: give
not belong to us.
qualitative prop-
great minds
level of
is stultified,
given up, the power thus conferred will
to
Little
real.
greatest
all. It is
our souls, that
most sure that
feel its
at
mere quantity, is scientists, and little
and reduced
erties
the
But
step of reduc-
our soul, get power in return. But once
not the
is
who
well
loss.
who has been sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity. It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel
stars lost their divinity as
sition
we may
the being
The
sense of impiety.
we take the final own species to the
time the being
pow-
as this process
as soon as
knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of
As long
hold that the gain outweighs the
this
of
also the surrendering
stops short of the final stage
exacted for our analytical
is
The wresting
is
it
have been
trying, like Lear, to
both ways: to lay
down
rogative and yet at the
to
mere Nature. Every con-
it.
quest over Nature increases her domain.
It is
spirit
526
our
human
same time
impossible. Either
we
have pre-
to retain
are rational
obliged for ever to obey the absolute
Man
Lewis: The Abolition of
common
values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new
will and common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into
shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but
own
value
'natural'
cation.
impulses.
over himself in a sense truly analogous
Tao
rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
am
I
who
public enemies at the moment.
which,
if
are
The
individual's
a
as
mere subjective product,
common
to
all
men
means simply the
of himself
process
on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values
ingly, nearly all
present
men
in all nations are at
labouring to
produce.
Nothing I can say will prevent some people from describing this lecture as an attack on science. I deny the charge, of course: and real Natural Philosophers
be 'debunked' and mankind to be some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent 'ideologies' at pleasure, and the con-
some now
(there are
that in defending value
like
every other
are cut. But
finally
himself,
power.
And
sales-resistance.
if
who
Tao
we
itself,
as long as
we remain
is
to
be truly
to
Nature
meant what
in
return
for
The
fact
I said.
is
it
the
new
thing
away. Those
survival
that
who have
came
and to
studied the
know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific en-
In the it,
which to human: the real
find the concrete reality in
participate
whereby and
write about the sixteenth century as
Science
going
within
I
Magic were a medieval
period
that the
a pure abstraction.
Tao
that the real story of the birth of Science
word Man
Man. Not
necessarily
roots in the
misunderstood. You will even find people
sweep
abstraction
its
that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought
on has been concealed by the use of the is
alia
surrenders object after object,
Once bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are 'potential officer material.' Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are killed
is
when
a 'magician's bargain' that process
man
preparations,
what
will perceive
defend inter
can go further than that. I even suggest that from Science herself the cure might come. I have described as
we
true significance of
I
I
begins to affect our very language.
The
alive)
the value of knowledge, which must die
mere
as
human
world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknow-
cut out into
specimens,
this
now
the
material,
are to
[matter],
is
rule of the
Conditioners over the conditioned
goes
hyle
What
is a mere abstract and Man's conquest
universal, an H.C.F.,
our
not checked, will abolish Man,
sequent treatment of mankind
But the and regard the
self-control.
step outside
possibility has disappeared.
not here thinking solely, perhaps
not even chiefly, of those
an
to
moment we
necessary to the very idea of a
is
new
beauties and dignities of appliWhile we speak from within the Tao we can speak of Man having power
ever
Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective their
527
528
Lewis: The Abolition of
whose love
deavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were bom of the
same impulse. not
all)
I
we
mixed movement the comes from the good elements, not from the bad. But the presence of the bad efficacy
were actu-
ated by a pure love of knowledge. But
elements
might be going too scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was bom in an unhealthy neighbourhood and far to say that the
whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the 'wisdom' of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and
at
striking.
You
will read in
seen something that orthodox researchers
is
have missed. The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the T/iow-situation. The analogy between the Tao of Man and the instincts of an animal species would mean for it new light cast on the unknown thing. Instinct, by the inly known reality of conscience and
critics that
knowledge. In reality, he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants from his devils, but gold and guns and girls. 'All things that move between the quiet poles shall be at his comFaustus has a
mand' and
thirst for
is a mighty Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a
god.' 35
*a
In
sound magician
the
spouse for
same
fruit.^^
The
spirit
true object
to
is
extend Man's power to the performance of all
things possible.
cause
it
He
rejects
that of the
characters
magician.
of magician
not a reduction of conscience to the cate-
magic be-
does not work,^^ but his goal
gory of Instinct.
is
scientist
are
combined. No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those
than that of
Perhaps 35 Dr. Faustus, 77-90. 36 Advancement of Learning, Bk. Vol. 30, p. 17a. 37 Filum Labyrinthi,
I;
Its
followers
would not
be free with the words only and merely. In a word, it would conquer Nature without being at the same time conquered by her and buy knowledge at a lower cost
In Paracelsus the
and
may
by analand abstraction is not reality but only a view, and always correcting the abstraction? I hardly know what I am asking for. I hear rumours that Goethe's approach to nature deserves fuller consideration—that even Dr. Steiner may have
era (Bacon)
some
triumphs
ysis
we compare
with Marlowe's Faustus, the similarity
Its
that the natural object' produced
disgusting and impious— such as digging If
an inauspicious hour.
Natural Philosophy, continually conscious
both, in the practice of this technique, are
new
It
modern
have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required. Is it, then, possible to imagine a new
ready to do things hitherto regarded as
the chief trumpeter of the
not irrelevant to the direction
is
the efficacy takes.
if
consider the temper of that age as a
up and mutilating the dead.
of truth exceeded their love
of power; in every
allow that some (certainly
of the early scientists
Man
I
life.
am
asking impossibilities. Per-
haps, in the nature of things, analytical
GBWW,
understanding must always be a basilisk
which
i.
529
kills
what
it
sees
and only sees by
Great Books Library But
killing.
if
common Reason and someone fear
is
else
the labour of your previous journey.
the scientists themselves can-
not arrest this process before
must
kills
arrest
the reply that
I
am
it
that too, then
it.
What
*only
up
all
Such a
modern imagination— the image
finite unilinear
of in-
progression which so haunts
we have to use nummuch we tend to think of every
our minds. Because bers so
of
away
Up
explanation
may
give
to that point,
which explains us
something,
though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to *see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible
reply springs from the fatal serialism of the
kind
things
pre-
against the advance
of science, can be safely passed.
a step of that kind.
the
one more'
obscurantist, that this barrier, like
vious barriers set
is
most
I
To
reduce the Tao to a mere natural product
reaches the
if it must be like the numeral where every step, to all eternity, is the same kind of step as the one before. I implore you to remember the Irishman and his two stoves. There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis— incommensurable with the others— and in which to go the whole way is to undo all
process as series,
world.
same
530
To
'see through'
as not to see.
all
things
is
the
Man
Lewis: The Abolition of
APPENDIX
men
not
'Terrify
thee.' (Ancient
God
or
will
terrify
Egyptian. Precepts of Ptah-
ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TAO
hetep. H. R. Hall, Ancient History of East, p. 133 n.)
The
ers.'
Nastrond {— Hell)
'In
following illustrations of the Natu-
Law
ral
sources as
who
is
from
collected
are
come
readily to the
hand
'I
list
validity
its
ment from common
consent.
'Who meditates
sent could not prove
it.
independent
The idea
(2)
vol.
that every
is
civilization
(Ancient
oppression, his dwelling
Hymn
to
de
Science
la
Politique,
not.'
ERE
v.
(Babylonian.
Hymn
to
445.)
'Thou shalt not bear
false witness against
thy neighbour.' (Ancient Jewish. Exodus XX. 16.)
'Utter
not a word
by which anyone
could be wounded.' (Hindu. Janet, p. 7.) 'Has he driven an honest man from
It is
.
.
.
family? broken
his
clan?' (Babylonian.
the sense required) been more than one able
478.)
v.
p. 6.)
Samas.
certain that there has ever (in
civilization in all history. It
i,
'Slander
of
pre-
'civilizations'
an assumption are extremely doubtful.
by no means
ERE
grasping.'
(Babylonian.
Histoire
Janet,
have arisen in the world independently of one another; or even that humanity has had several independent emergences on this planet. The biology and anthropology involved in such supposes that
fel-
Samal ERE v. 455.) 'He who is cruel and calumnious has the character of a cat.' (Hindu. Laws of Manu.
validity
testimonies
overturned.'
is
cannot be deduced. For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal concollectmg
my
Egyptian. Ibid.)
by the arguIts
have not been
'I
am
(1) I
murder-
.
I
fession of Righteous Soul.
be noticed that writers such as Locke and Hooker, who wrote within the Christian tradition, are quoted side by side with the New Testament. This would, of course, be absurd if I were trying to collect indepennot trying to prove
.
have not made the beginning of every day laborious in the sight of him who worked for me.' (Ancient Egyptian. Con-
of completeness. It will
dent testimonies to the Tao. But
.
(Old Norse. Volospd 38, 39.) have not brought misery upon
lows.
one
The
not a professional historian.
makes no pretence
such of
saw
I
Near
up a well cemented List of Sins
ERE
from
in-
at least argu-
cantation tablets.
we
'I have not caused hunger. I have not caused weeping.' (Ancient Egyptian. ERE
find has
been derived from another civilization and, in the last resort, from a single centre— 'carried' like an infectious disease or like the
v.
466.)
478.)
V.
'Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.' (Ancient Chinese.
Apostolical succession.
Analects of Confucius, tran. A. Waley, xv. I.
THE LAV^ OF GENERAL BENEFICENCE
23;
cf. xii. 2.)
'Thou shalt not hate thy brother
in
thy
heart.' (Ancient Jewish. Leviticus xix. 17.) (a)
Negative
'He whose heart is in the smallest degree upon goodness will dislike no one.'
1 have not slain men.' (Ancient Egyptian. From the Confession of the Righteous Soul, 'Book of the Dead.' v. of Religion
set
(Ancient Chinese. Analects,
iv. 4.)
Encyclopedia
and Ethics [=ERE],
vol.
(b)
v,
Positive
'Nature urges that a
p. 478.)
human
'Do not murder.' (Ancient Jewish. Exodus XX. 13.)
enter
531
society to exist
it.'
man
should wish
and should wish
(Roman. Cicero,
De
to
Officiis, I. iv.)
Great Books Library 'By the fundamental
Law of Nature Man much as possible.'
'You will see them take care of their
be preserved as
to
[is]
(Locke,
Treatises
GBWW,
Vol. 35, p. 28d.)
'When
Govt.
Civil
of
ii.
kindred [and] the children of their friends never reproaching them in the least.'
3;
.
.
.
Le Jeune, quoted ERE v. 437.) 'Love thy wife studiously. Gladden her
(Redskin.
the people have multiplied,
what
The Master Enrich them. Jan Ch'iu said. When one has enriched them, what next should next should be done for them?
heart
said.
ERE
be done
them? The Master
for
struct them.' (Ancient Chinese. xiii.
said,
(Babylonian.
Hymn
.
'Nothing can ever change the claims of Saxon. Beowulf, 2600.)
Analects,
to
show good
.
.
'Men were brought
Samas.
ERE
v.
though he did so
445.)
not forgetting that the gods have the
men that they might do one another (Roman. Cicero, De Off. I. vii.) 'Man is man's delight.' (Old Norse.
Hdvamdl
is
'Natural affection
asked for alms should always i.
'I
ficial
man: nothing human is alien to The Self-Tormen-
Jewish. Leviticus
'This
thy
grows.
And
like a statue
natural and arti-
and a
citizen.'
(Greek,
rede thee: be blameless to
I
Take no vengeance even
(Ancient
their wives?
'Is
vii.
upon the trunk
When
first
kindred.
thyself.'
to
do
that
is
only the sons of Atreus
it
who
love
For every good man, who is right-minded, loves and cherishes his owti.'
Homer,
(Greek.
to
Iliad,
ix.
340;
GBWW,
Vol. 4, p. 60c.)
12.)
'The union and fellowship of men will be best preserved if each receives from us the more kindness in proportion as he is more closely connected with us.' (Roman.
THE LAW OF SPECIAL BENEFICENCE is
my
pp. 177d-178a.)
Sigrdrifumdl, 22.)
men what you wish men
you.' (Christian. Matt.
'It
ii;
(Ancient
Jewish. Ibid. 33, 34.)
works.
both
thyself.'
xix. 18.)
'Love the stranger as
II.
xi;
though they do thee wrong.' (Old Norse.
'Love thy neighbour as
'Do to
and
I.
relations, as a worshipper, a son, a
Ibid. III.
25.)
i.
Vol. 12, p. 207a.) a thing right
be unfeeling
to
fulfil
brother, a father,
me.' (Roman. Terence, I.
ought not
but should
7.)
XV. 140.)
tor,
is
according to Nature.' (Greek. Ibid.
'What good man regards any misfortune no concern of his?' (Roman. Juvenal, a
first
p. 117c.)
(Hindu. Janet,
am
GBWW,
tetus. III. xxiv;
47.)
who
as a free
on our friendship?' (Greek, Epic-
claim
into existence for the
good.'
'I
own children, man and as one
will.'
sake of
as
(Ancient Egyptian.
'Did not Socrates love his
'Speak kindness
'He
life long.'
481.)
kinship for a right thinking man.' (Anglo-
In-
9.)
give.'
thy
all
V.
Cicero,
De
xvi.)
claimed by our country, part by our parents, part by our friends.'
that a gentleman
firmly set up, the
I.
Off.
'Part of us
Way
(Roman.
is
Ibid.
I.
vii.)
and be each others' bane.' (Old Norse. Account of the Evil Age
compassed the salvation would call him Good? The Master said. It would no longer be a matter of "Good." He would without doubt be a Divine Sage.' (Ancient
before the World's end, Volospd 45.)
Chinese. Analects,
ents
surely proper behaviour to par-
and elder brothers
is
'If
the trunk of
goodness.' (Ancient Chinese. Analects,
i.
of the
2.)
'Brothers shall fight
'Has he insulted his elder lonian. List of Sins.
ERE
v.
sister?'
a ruler
whole
.
.
.
state, surely >'ou
vi.
28.)
escaped you that, in the eyes of gods and good men, your native land de'Has
(Baby-
446.)
532
it
Lewis: The Abolition of serves from you
your ancestors? That you should give a answer to its anger than to a father's if
you cannot persuade
GBWW,
is
they are far away, the moral force
.
its
(Ancient Chinese. Analects,
own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith.' (Christian. I. Tim. v. 8.) 'Put them in mind to obey magistrates.' T exhort that prayers be made for kings and all that are in authority.' (Christian. Tit. iii. 1 and I Tim. ii. 1, 2.) .
v.
478.)
'When proper respect towards the dead shown at the end and continued after
a people has reached
Vol. 7, p. 217b.)
any provide not for
*If
ERE
fession of the Righteous Soul.
mind you must obey it in all quietness, whether it binds you or beats you or sends you to a war where you may get wounds or death?' (Greek. Plato, Crito, 51 alter its
A. b;
have not taken away the oblations of
'I
the blessed dead.' (Ancient Egyptian. Con-
to
it
v.
437.)
softer
anger? That
ERE
men.' (Redskin. Le Jeune, quoted
more honour, worship, and
reverence than your mother and father and all
Man
[te] of
highest point.' 9.)
i.
his
IV.
DUTIES TO CHILDREN AND POSTERITY
.
'Children, the old, the poor, etc., should
be considered (Hindu. Janet,
as lords of the atmosphere.' 8.)
i.
'To marry and to beget children.' (Greek. List of duties. Epictetus, III.
vii;
GBWW,
Vol. 12, p. 183c.)
DUTIES TO PARENTS,
III.
'Can you conceive an Epicurean commonwealth? What will happen? Whence is the population to be kept up? Who will educate them? Who will be Director of Adolescents? Who will be Director of Physical Training? What will be
ELDERS, ANCESTORS
.
'Your father Creation,
Earth. For
is
an image of the Lord of
your mother an image of the
him who
every work of piety first
fails to is
honour them, This
in vain.
duty.' (Hindu. Janet,
i.
is
the
ERE
'I was a staff by went in and out at
Egyptian.
ERE
Soul.
my his
Confession V.
v.
'Nature produces a special love of
Father's side. ...
the
I
Righteous
less glorious
481.)
'Honour thy Father and thy Mother.' (Ancient Jewish. Exodus xx. 12.)
first
Epictetus,
III. vii;
GBWW,
than the
men, the poor, and the should be considered as the lords of the atmosphere.' (Hindu. Janet, i. 8.)
xix. 32.)
of the people,
(Ancient Egyptian.
ERE
v.
to
a
child.'
ix.
22.)
women and more esyoung boys and girls who
'The killing of the pecially of the
staff.'
I. xxii.)
owed
(Ancient Chinese. Analects,
'Rise up before the hoary head and honour the old man.' (Ancient Jewish. Lev.
gave him
is
(Roman. Juvenal, xiv. 47.) 'The Master said. Respect the young.'
'Children, old
I
Off.
'Great reverence
sick,
tended the old man,
De
(Roman. Cicero,
Vol. 12,
p. 183c.)
'I
for while the
first;
did good on one occasion, the second
will continue to benefit the state forever.'
'To care for parents.' (Greek. List of duties in
off-
and 'To live according to Nature is the supreme good.' (Roman. Cicero, De Off. I. iv, and De Legibus, I. xxi.) 'The second of these achievements is no spring'
446.)
command.' (Ancient of
.
taught?' (Greek. Ibid.; p. 183b.)
9.)
'Has he despised Father and Mother?' (Babylonian. List of Sins.
.
are to go to
my
we
feel
it
make up is
432.)
533
.
.
.
and
very sorely.' (Redskin. Account
of the Battle of
481.)
'You will see them take care ... of old
the future strength
the saddest part
Wounded
Knee.
ERE
v.
Great Books Library
THE LAW OF JUSTICE
V.
Justice in Court, 6c.
(c)
'Whoso takes no bribe Sexual Justice
(a)
approached
he
'Has
his
neighbour's
ERE
wife?' (Babylonian. List of Sins.
v.
446.)
Exodus
1 saw
.
.
XX. 16.)
.
whom thou knowest like whom thou knowest not.' (Ancient Egyptian. ERE v. 482.) 'Regard him
ers of others' wives.'
him
38, 39.)
'Do no unrighteousness
Honesty
(b)
false witness against
thy neighbour.' (Ancient Jewish. Exodus
xx. 14.)
beguilNastrond (= Hell) (Old Norse. Volospd
in
well pleasing
.
.
this to
'Thou shalt not bear
'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' (Ancient Jewish.
.
Samas. (Babylonian. ERE v. 445.) 'I have not traduced the slave to him who is set over him.' (Ancient Egyptian. Confession of Righteous Soul. ERE v. 478.) is
one poor nor the fact that the other is a great man.' (Ancient Jewish. Leviticus
*Has he drawn false boundaries?' (Babylonian. List of Sins.
ERE
judgement.
in
You must not consider the party
v. 446.)
'To wrong, to rob, to cause to be robbed.'
fact that
is
xix. 15.)
(Babylonian. Ibid.)
have
'I
not
stolen.'
Egyp-
(Ancient
ERE
Confession of Righteous Soul.
tian.
478.)
V.
'Thou shalt not
Exodus
steal.'
XX. 15.)
'Choose
loss rather
than shameful gains.'
'A sacrifice
'Justice
the settled
is
intention
(Roman.
rights.'
tions, 'If
(e.g.
I.
rendering
of
a
and permanent
Janet,
man
each
to
honey
tree)
he
ERE
V.
'The
left
it.'
and marked
it,
it
was
is
that
none
V.
good
property, and private property as his own. There is no such thing as private property by nature, but things have become private
ers.'
Master
faith.'
said,
(Ancient
ERE
v.
Reowulf, 2738.)
Be
of
unwavering
Chinese.
Analects,
Nastrond (= Hell)
I
saw the
perjur-
(Old Norse. Volospd 39.)
me as are the gates of Hades man who says one thing, and hides
'Hateful to
when
is
that
of old came into empty territory) or by conquest, or law, or agreement, or stipulation, or casting lots.' (Roman. Cicero,
another
Dc
(Roman. Cicero,
I.
445.)
Yea, in
13.)
'In
men
Off.
v.
478.)
'The
viii.
either through prior occupation (as
Nay?' (Babylonian.
oaths.' (Anglo-Saxon.
common
property as
full of
sought no trickery, nor swore false
'I
he has first been attacked by the other's wrongdoing. The second is that a man
common
ERE
Samas.
have not spoken falsehood.' (Ancient
'I
should do any mischief to another unless
should treat
to
Egyptian. Confession of Righteous Soul.
ERE point of justice
not
446.)
Aborigines.
(Australian
Hymn
his heart full of
own no matter how
441.) first
and the
full of lying, avails
'With his mouth was he
a "find" of any kind
thereafter safe for him, as far as his
long
lie
before thee: thou burnest their utterance.*
Institu-
Justinian,
tribesmen were concerned,
by a
6.)
i.
(Babylonian.
made
obliterated
'Whose mouth,
i.)
the native
is
merit of alms by an act of fraud.' (Hindu.
(Greek. Chilon Fr. 10. Diels.)
his
THE LAW^ OF GOOD FAITH AND VERACITY
VI.
(Ancient Jewish,
ix.
312;
in his heart.' (Greek.
GBWW,
'The foundation of justice
vii.)
534
Homer,
Iliad,
Vol. 4, p. 60b.)
De
Off.
is
I. vii.)
good
faith.'
Man
Lewis: The Abolition of '[The gentleman] must learn to be faith-
and
ful to his superiors
to
(a)
(Ancient Chinese. Analects,
'Anything
is
I.
8.)
'There are two kinds of injustice: the
better than treachery.' (Old
Hdvamdl
Norse.
THE LAW OF MAGNANIMITY
VIII.
keep promises.'
found
first is
124.)
second
from
THE LAW OF MERCY
VII.
well pleasing
ERE
V.
is
intercession for the weak,
Samas.' (Babylonian.
this to
445.)
'Has he failed to set a prisoner free?' (Babylonian. List of Sins.
have given bread
ERE
446.)
v.
to the
hungry, water
to the thirsty, clothes to the
naked, a ferry
'I
Off,
they
an injury, the
protect another
4.)_
'To take no notice of a violent attack
boat to the boatless.' (Ancient Egyptian.
to strengthen the heart of the
ERE
our
V.
478.)
'One should never strike a woman; not even with a flower.' (Hindu. Janet, i. 8.) 'There, Thor, you got disgrace, when you beat women.' (Old Norse. Hdrbarths-
cit.
Dalebura
tribe a
woman,
.
.
.
ings of the Blessed
a crip-
pany
ERE
Virgil,
Aen.
.
.
wounds
suffered
(Roman.
fatherland.'
their vi,
the dwell-
here was the com-
638-9, 660;
GRWW,
'Courage has got to be harder, heart the
'You will see them take care of ows,
orphans,
.
.
ERE
stouter, spirit the sterner, as our strength
wid-
.
and old men, never
proaching them.' (Redskin.
weakens. Here
re-
human
man
lies
our lord, cut to pieces,
anyone thinks he can howl forever.' (Anglo-Saxon, Maldon, 312.) 'Praise and imitate that man to whom,
our best
439.)
v.
'Nature confesses that she has given to
in the dust. If
of leaving this battle,
by power to weep. This is the best part of us.' (Roman. Juvenal, xv. 131.) 'They said that he had been the mildest and gentlest of the kings of the world.' race the tenderest hearts,
giving us the
while (Stoic.
life is
pleasing, death
Seneca, Ep.
is
not grievous.'
liv.)
'The Master said, Love learning and
(Anglo-Saxon. Praise of the hero in Reo-
attacked be ready to die for the
wulf, 3180.)
Way.' (Ancient Chinese. Analects,
'When thou vest
Vol.
13, p. 228a-b.)
v.
443.)
the
for
.
fields of joy, the fresh
Woods and
who had
of those
fighting
'They never desert
(Australian Aborigines.
III.
H. R. Hall, Ancient History of the Near
'They came to the
was carried about by the
sixty-six.'
sick.'
(An-
is vile.'
East, p. 161.)
tribespeople in turn until her death at the
age of
cowardice
is
enemy. Vig-
The Pharaoh Seunsert
turf of the Fortunate
ple from birth,
the
valiant, but
is
cient Egyptian.
Ijoth 38.) 'In the
(Roman.
can.'
I, vii.)
injury
8.)
i.
'Whoso makes
De
fail to
'Men always knew that when force and was offered they might be defenders of themselves; they knew that howsoever men may seek their own commodity, yet if this were done with injury unto others it was not to be suffered, but by all men and by all good means to be withstood.' (English. Hooker, Laws of EccL Polity, 1. ix.
'The poor and the sick should be regarded as lords of the atmosphere.' (Hindu. Janet,
who when
injury
Cicero,
who do
in those
in those
.
.
.
cuttest
down
thine
and hast forgot a sheaf
shalt not go again to fetch
it
.
.
.
viii.
13.)
harih)
thou
be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.' (Ancient Jewish. Deut. it:
if
Good
'Death
shall
is
to
be chosen before slavery and
base deeds.' (Roman. Cicero,
De
Off.
I.
xxiii.)
'Death
xxiv. 19.)
535
is
better
for
every
man
than
Great Books Library life
with shame.' (Anglo-Saxon. Beotvulf,
'Nature and Reason lascivious
command
that noth-
Off.
I.
*We must not us "being
men
being
his
who advise human thoughts,
listen to those
to think
mortal
and
strain every
which, being small in bulk, yet its
nerve
GBWW,
'Is
a;
all else.'
This
spirit of
the highest
power
of the
'Let
all
the
rest.'
desire to die, let
desire to live, let
him wait
him not
for his time
.
.
a practice of
Vol. 7, p. 232d.) I hung on the gallows for wounded with the spear as a
Odin, myself offered to Myself.'
remains alone, but
cit. I. viii. 6.)
him not
Wisdom
Old Norse, Hdvamdl, 1. 10 in Corpus Poeticum Boreale; stanza 139 in Hildebrand's Lieder der Alteren Edda. 1922.) 'Verily, verily I say to you unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it
Law, whereby mind requireth
obedience at the hands of (Hooker, op.
90.)
that
sacrifice to
our minds the soul. first
know
nine nights,
Vol. 9, p. 432c.)
therefore the
is
not the love of
GBWW, 'I
'The soul then ought to conduct the
body, and the
ii.
death?' (Ancient Greek. Plato, Fhaedo, 81
(Ancient Greek. Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 1177 a;
ERE
gita.
(c)
much more
power and honour surpasses
B-1178
the devoted.' (Ancient Indian, Bha-
is
mortal
think
to
so
gavad
to live according to that best part of us,
in
is
flame in a windless place that flickers not,
iv.)
possible
is
Laws
who
'He
thoughts," but must put on immortality as as
of Manu. ERE ii. 98.) unmoved, who has restrained senses ... is said to be devoted. As a
Indian.
be done or thought.' (Roman.
De
Cicero,
much
patiently bear hard words, entirely
abstaining from bodily pleasures.' (Ancient
ing uncomely, nothing effeminate, nothing
and
him
let
2890.)
fruit.
tian.
.
He who John
xii.
dies
if it
loves his
it
bears
life loses
it.'
much
(Chris-
24, 25.)
NOTE TO THE READER and Nature 5a: Human nature in regood for man. Discussions of the problem of moral education are cited under Education 4: The formation of a good character, virtue, a right will. The use of literature and the arts to train the emotions and develop character is discussed in the passages cited under Art 10a: The role of the arts in the training of youth; and Poetry 9: The moral and political signifivirtue;
Books of the Western World is rich in materials bearing on all the major topics that Lewis writes about. Discussions of moral knowledge and the meaning of value statements can be found by consulting the Syntopicon under Good 6d: The possibility of moral knowledge; and Principle 4:
Great
The
lation to the
principles of action or morality; the prin-
ciples of the practical reason.
Amonj; the illustrations of the Too that Lewis includes in his Appendix, many are from Great Books. For further consideration of the fioods and duties of man, the reader should consult Good 3a; Human nature and the determination of the good for man; Law 4d: The natural law as underlying the precepts of
cance of poetry. Excellent writing about the emotions can be found throughout the works of imaginative literature contained in the Great Books set as well as in Gateway to the Great Books. For discussions of poetry and emotion, the reader
should refer to Poetry
536
6.
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Key
to abbreviations
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to indicate location of pictures
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Frontispiece, Walters -Art Gallery* —PAGE 4 Donald Getsug from Rapho Guillumette —6 Costa Manos © 1961 Magnum Photos —8, 9 Bruce Davidson © 1965 Magnum Photos —10 Gary Renaud from —12 Bruce Davidson © 1965 Magnum Photos Pix
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set
538
Homer
Nicomachus
Aeschylus
Ptolemy
Sophocles
Marcus Aurelius
Herodotus
Galen
Euripides
Plotinus
Thucydides
Augustine
Hippocrates
Thomas Aquinas
Aristophanes
Dante
Plato
Chaucer
Aristotle
Machiavelli
Euclid
Copernicus
Archimedes
Rabelais
Apollonius
Montaigne
Lucretius
Gilbert
Virgil
Cervantes
Plutarch
Francis Bacon
Tacitus
Galileo
Epictetus
Shakespeare Kepler
Harvey
Boswell
Hobbes
Lavoisier
Descartes
John Jay
Milton
Goethe
Pascal
James Madison
Huygens
Alexander Hamilton
Locke
Fourier
Spinoza
Hegel
Newton
Faraday
Swift
J.
Berkeley
Darwin
Montesquieu
Marx
Fielding
Melville
Hume
Engels
Rousseau
Dostoevsky
Sterne
Tolstoy
Adam
Smith
Kant
Gibbon
S.
Mill
William James
Freud