A Nation Crying For Guidance

( Originally Published 1920 )

SIR, Dean Inge, in your issue of August 23, draws a convincing picture of Humanity, having struck its tents, wandering without a track or a leader, not knowing whither it goeth. The old organisation, dependent upon stored reserves of material commodities, has emerged from the war bankrupt, and we are consuming its few remaining assets far faster than we are replacing them our so-called reconstruction is merely the completion of the destructive process. There does not appear to be any new organisation capable of carrying on the work of civilisation ; the League of Nations is to be encouraged, but Dean Inge like most other watchers on the hill-tops has evidently little faith in its ability to govern the world. The Dean, therefore, justifies his gloomy reputation inasmuch as he refuses to prophesy fair things to those who would welcome the re-establishment of society on its firm pre-war basis of commercialism. He is at bottom no pessimist, for he believes that if the world would give the Gospel of Christ a fair trial all would yet be well, and he has recognised the dominant fact that the spirit of Christ is firmly planted in multitudes of our people who make no profession of Christianity ; but it is true that pronouncements lose much of their force when they come from the lips of an ecclesiastic, whose enemies will retort that it is his business to say such things, and that his Church has offered little guidance to a nation crying for guidance.

But when in our search for a solution to this " Riddle of the Future " we turn from religion to science not rejecting the solution offered by Dean Inge, but recognising that it will not be accepted in its present-day dress we find that science, as represented by Professor Bury, is mainly concerned with negations. Professor Bury calls for liberty, that cardinal principle of Western civilisation, which has been omitted from Bolshevism and from all the other social experiments which theorists are eager to impose upon us. It is easy to agree in this demand, but it is merely negative. We are not told what we are to do with our liberty, and liberty per se is no more than the negation of that coercive discipline against which we all rebel, but without which few of us can live socially useful lives. The same criticism applies to Professor Bury's advocacy of the deliberate limitation of population. The universal acceptance and practice of Malthusian principles would amount to a successful repudiation of the competitive discipline imposed upon us by Nature ; there is no reason to suppose that it would give us any effective control of ourselves to replace Nature's roughly beneficent tyranny, but there is reason to believe that we should find ourselves in the grip of a tyrannous self-interest far more irksome than any economic discipline from which we suffer today. Maithusianism is useful as a protest against the vicious economic theories of a century ago, which taught that all that was necessary for social salvation was an unlimited supply of human material and ruthless competition ; there is no danger of its universal acceptance before the achievement of a real discipline of ourselves by our-selves. As Professor Bury rather despairingly suggests, the hope of the future seems to lie in the scientific control of human conduct. Does experimental psychology hold the solution of our difficulties ?

If we are expecting a scientific genius to come forward and lead the people by his expert advice to healthy ways of living, it is certain that we shall be disappointed. The sound advice might be forth-coming ; it would certainly not be followed. Modern practical psychology is more concerned with the control of emotion than with logical argument ; but emotion (as distinct from the expression of emotion) cannot be controlled except by consent ; and the normal man or woman will refuse that consent, much preferring to be ruled by his or her own emotions. It is time for us to abandon the vain search for a heaven-sent leader, who will save us the trouble of thinking for ourselves. Democracy has wasted its energies thus since the day of its discovery that direct self-government of each man by himself is impossibly difficult. We have to face these facts— that independent self-government is impossible, that discipline is essential, and that discipline arbitrarily applied to individuals from without will no longer be tolerated. How can we achieve a discipline at once effective and tolerable ? Nature solved the same problem in the early days of life upon the earth, and it is to Nature herself, rather than to any scientist, that we should look for guidance. In those dim and shadowy days the progressive evolution of life found itself opposed by an apparently impassable barrier. The highest form of life upon the earth, a mass of cells in all not much bigger than a pin-head, was yet too large for internal efficiency ; its cells were so numerous that they could not readily follow the lead of any one cell, yet for other reasons it was inadvisable to split up into smaller colonies of cells. Nature met the difficulty by separating the herd or mass of cells into two classes or sub-herds, one concerned with protection from external danger, the other with the absorption of food. Each sub-herd had its own habits and conventions and its own special work, but they had a common heredity and constitution, and each class was dependent upon the other for many of the necessities of life. The two classes of cells were thus kept in close contact and sympathy, and by their further growth and further specialisation have given us all the higher forms of life, including man himself.

Nature is to-day setting about the solution of a precisely parallel problem. Instead of material cells we have the invisible minds of men ; instead of a mass of cells we have that community of minds which we call a people ; the life to be controlled shows itself not in the clumsy movements of a soft mass of cells, but in the emotions which determine the life of a people. And in place of Nature's old method of haphazard trial and failure, requiring thousands of years to reach a solution, we have Nature's new method of the avoidance of mistakes by the intelligent prevision of man, so that visible results can be achieved in a generation. But if this immense experiment of Nature is to be successful it must be carried out by the whole community of minds, who will be at once the experimenters and the material for the experiment ; for it will involve a real modification of each mind, a change which can only come from within. It will, I think, be found that each individual can have complete freedom of action if he will put himself in so intimate a friend-ship with those better able to think clearly that his thought will naturally be influenced by them, or that he can have complete freedom of thought if he will take his standards of conduct from the more conventional men of action. Whichever he may choose, he will seem to surrender some of his independence ; but his independence is at present very largely illusory, and in practice it will be found that the man who thus sacrifices himself will gain a measure of control over both himself and others far greater than he has enjoyed in his previous condition of alleged independence. There is urgent need to make a beginning. The many will follow, if there is a trodden track which they can see, when they are frightened by the clearly impending collapse of the social fabric, but probably not until then.—Yours, etc.,

J. NORMAN GLAISTER, M.B., B.S.

46, Weymouth Street, W.