In a series of lectures instituted to keep alive the memory of that inspired and successful social reformer, Eleanor Rathbone, it is perhaps not out of place to devote a lecture to a general though tentative assessment of the problem of social reform in our time. What have we achieved, if anything? How does our western society compare with others? These are the questions which I propose to discuss.
I have chosen as the title of my lecture ‘The History of Our Time: An Optimist’s View’, and I feel that I should begin by explaining this title.
When I say ‘History’, I wish to refer particularly to our social and political history, but also to our moral and intellectual history. By the word ‘our’, I mean the free world of the Atlantic Community— especially England, the United States, the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland, and the outposts of this world in the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. By ‘our time’ I mean, in particular, the period since 1914. But I also mean the last fifty or sixty years—that is to say the time since the Boer War, or the age of Winston Churchill, as one might call it; the last hundred years—that is, in the main, the time since the abolition of slavery and since John Stuart Mill; the last two hundred years—that is, in the main, the time since the American Revolution, since Hume, Voltaire, Kant, and Burke; and to a lesser extent, the last three hundred years—the time since the Reformation; since Locke, and since Newton. So much for the phrase ‘The History of Our Time’.
Now I come to the word ‘Optimist’. First let me make it quite clear that if I call myself an optimist, I do not wish to suggest that I know anything about the future. I do not wish to pose as a prophet, least of all as a historical prophet. On the contrary, I have for many years tried to defend the view that historical prophecy is a kind of quackery.1 I do not believe in historical laws, and I disbelieve especially in anything like a law of progress. In fact, I believe that it is much easier for us to regress than to progress.
Though I believe all this, I think that I may fairly describe myself as an optimist. For my optimism lies entirely in my interpretation of the present and the immediate past. It lies in my strongly appreciative view of our own time. And whatever you might think about this optimism you will have to admit that it has a scarcity value. In fact the wailings of the pessimists have become somewhat monotonous. No doubt there is much in our world about which we can rightly complain if only we give our mind to it; and no doubt it is sometimes most important to find out what is wrong with us. But I think that the other side of the story might also get a hearing.
Thus it is with respect to the immediate past and to our own time that I hold optimistic views. And this brings me finally to the word ‘view’ which is the last word of my title. What I shall be aiming at in this lecture is to sketch, in a few strokes, a kind of bird’s-eye view of our time. It will no doubt be a very personal view—an interpretation rather than a description. But I shall try to support it by argument. And although pessimists will feel that my view is superficial, I shall at least try to present it in a way that may challenge them.
And so I begin with a challenge. I will challenge a certain belief which seems to be widely held, and held in widely different quarters; not only by many Churchmen whose sincerity is beyond doubt, but also by some rationalists such as Bertrand Russell, whom I greatly admire as a man and as a philosopher.
Russell has more than once expressed the belief I wish to challenge. He has complained that our intellectual development has outrun our moral development.
We have become very clever, according to Russell, indeed too clever. We can make lots of wonderful gadgets, including television, high-speed rockets, and an atom bomb, or a thermonuclear bomb, if you prefer. But we have not been able to achieve that moral and political growth and maturity which alone could safely direct and control the uses to which we put our tremendous intellectual powers. This is why we now find ourselves in mortal danger. Our evil national pride has prevented us from achieving the world-state in time.
To put this view in a nutshell: we are clever, perhaps too clever, but we are also wicked; and this mixture of cleverness and wickedness lies at the root of our troubles.
As against this, I shall maintain precisely the opposite. My first thesis is this.
We are good, perhaps a little too good, but we are also a little stupid; and it is this mixture of goodness and stupidity which lies at the root of our troubles.
To avoid misunderstandings, I should stress that when I use the word ‘we’, in this thesis, I include myself.
You may perhaps ask me why my first thesis should be part of an optimist’s view. There are various reasons. One is that wickedness is even more difficult to combat than a limited measure of stupidity, because good men who are not very clever are usually very anxious to learn.
Another reason is that I do not think that we are hopelessly stupid, and this is surely an optimist’s view. What is wrong with us is that we so easily mislead ourselves, and that we are so easily ‘led by the nose’ by others, as Samuel Butler says in Erewhon. I hope you will let me quote from one of my favourite passages: ‘It will be seen’, Butler writes, ‘… that the Erewhonians are a meek and long-suffering people, easily led by the nose, and quick to offer up common sense at the shrine of logic, when a philosopher arises among them, who carries them away … by convincing them that their existing institutions are not based on the strictest principles of morality.’
You see that my first thesis, although it is directly opposed to such an authority as Bertrand Russell, is far from original. Samuel Butler seems to have thought along similar lines.
Both Butler’s formulation of this thesis and my own are somewhat flippant in form. But the thesis might be put more seriously in this way.
The main troubles of our time—and I do not deny that we live in troubled times—are not due to our moral wickedness, but, on the contrary, to our often misguided moral enthusiasm: to our anxiety to better the world we live in. Our wars are fundamentally religious wars; they are wars between competing theories of how to establish a better world. And our moral enthusiasm is often misguided, because we fail to realize that our moral principles, which are sure to be over-simple, are often difficult to apply to the complex human and political situations to which we feel bound to apply them.
I certainly do not expect you to agree at once, either with my thesis or with Butler’s. And even if you sympathize with Butler’s, you are hardly likely to sympathize with mine. Butler, you might say, was a Victorian. But how can I hold the view that we do not live in a world of wickedness? Have I forgotten Hitler and Stalin? I have not. But I do not allow myself to be over-impressed by them. In spite of them, and with my eyes open, I remain an optimist. They, and their immediate helpers, may be set aside in this context. What is more interesting is the fact that the great dictators had a very large following. But I contend that my first thesis or, if you like, Butler’s thesis, does apply to most of their followers. Most of those who followed Hitler and Stalin did so precisely because, to use Butler’s phrase, they were ‘easily led by the nose’. Admittedly, the great dictators did appeal to all sorts of fears and hopes, to prejudices and to envy, and even to hatred. But their main appeal was an appeal to a kind of morality—no doubt a dubious morality. They had a message; and they demanded sacrifices. It is sad to see how easily an appeal to morality can be misused. But it is simply a fact that the great dictators were always trying to convince their people that they knew the way to a higher morality.
To illustrate my point, I may remind you of a remarkable pamphlet, published as recently as 1942. In this pamphlet the then Bishop of Bradford attacked a certain form of society which he described as ‘immoral’ and ‘un-Christian’, and of which he said: ‘when something is so plainly the work of the devil, … nothing can excuse a minister of the Church from working for its destruction’. The society which, in the Bishop’s opinion, was the work of the devil was not Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia; it was our own Western society, the free world of the Atlantic Community. And the Bishop said these things in a pamphlet which was written in order to support the truly satanic system of Stalin. I am absolutely convinced that the Bishop’s moral condemnation was sincere. But moral fervour blinded him, and many like him, to facts which others could easily see; for example, to the fact that countless innocent people were being tortured in Stalin’s prisons.2
Here, I am afraid, you have an example of a typical refusal to face facts, even if they are obvious facts; of a typical lack of criticism; of a typical readiness to be ‘led by the nose’ (to use Butler’s words again); to be led by the nose by anybody who claims that our ‘existing institutions are not based on the strictest principles of morality’. You have here an example of how dangerous goodness can be if too much of it is combined with too little rational criticism.
But the Bishop does not stand alone. Some of you may remember an uncontradicted report from Prague in The Times, about four or five years ago, in which a famous British physicist was said to have described Stalin as the greatest of all scientists. One wonders what this famous physicist will say now that the doctrine of Stalin’s satanism has become, if only for the time being, an essential component of the party line itself. It all shows how astonishingly liable we are to be led by the nose if anybody arises who claims to know the way to a higher morality.
The believers in Stalin offer a sad spectacle today. But if we admire the martyrs of Christianity, we cannot completely withhold a reluctant admiration from those who retained their faith in Stalin while being tortured in Russian prisons. Theirs was a faith in a cause we know to be bad; today even party members know it. But they believed in it in all sincerity.
We see how important this aspect of our troubles is if we remember that the great dictators were all forced to pay homage to the goodness of man. They were forced to pay lip-service to a morality in which they did not believe. Communism and nationalism are both believed in as moralities and religions. This is their only strength. Intellectually they border on absurdity.
The absurdity of the communist faith is manifest. Appealing to the belief in human freedom, it has produced a system of oppression without parallel in history.
But the nationalist faith is equally absurd. I am not alluding here to Hitler’s racial myth. What I have in mind is, rather, an alleged natural right of man—the alleged right of a nation to self-determination. That even a great humanitarian and liberal like Masaryk could uphold this absurdity as one of the natural rights of man is a sobering thought. It suffices to shake one’s faith in the wisdom of philosopher kings, and it should be contemplated by all who think that we are clever but wicked rather than good but stupid. For the utter absurdity of the principle of national self-determination must be plain to anybody who devotes a moment’s effort to criticizing it. The principle amounts to the demand that each state should be a nation-state: that it should be confined within a natural border, and that this border should coincide with the location of an ethnic group; so that it should be the ethnic group, the ‘nation’, which should determine and protect the natural limits of the state.
But nation-states of this kind do not exist. Even Iceland—the only exception I can think of—is only an apparent exception to this rule. For its limits are determined, not by its ethnic group, but by the North Atlantic—just as they are protected, not by the Icelandic nation, but by the North Atlantic Treaty. Nation-states do not exist, simply because the so-called ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’ of which the nationalists dream do not exist. There are no, or hardly any, homogenous ethnic groups long settled in countries with natural borders. Ethnic and linguistic groups (dialects often amount to linguistic barriers) are closely intermingled everywhere. Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia was founded upon the principle of national self-determination. But as soon as it was founded, the Slovaks demanded, in the name of this principle, to be free from Czech domination; and ultimately it was destroyed by its German minority, in the name of the same principle. Similar situations have arisen in practically every case in which the principle of national self-determination has been applied to fixing the borders of a new state: in Ireland, in India, in Israel, in Yugoslavia. There are ethnic minorities everywhere. The proper aim cannot be to ‘liberate’ all of them; rather, it must be to protect all of them. The oppression of national groups is a great evil; but national self-determination is not a feasible remedy. Moreover, Britain, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland, are four obvious examples of states which in many ways violate the nationality principle. Instead of having its borders determined by one settled group, each of them has managed to unite a variety of ethnic groups. So the problem does not seem insoluble.
Yet, in the face of all these obvious facts, the principle of national self-determination continues to be widely accepted as an article of our moral faith; and it is rarely challenged outright. A Cypriot appealed recently, in a letter to The Times, to this principle. He described it as a universally accepted principle of morality. The defenders of this principle, he proudly claimed, were defending the sacred human values and the natural rights of man (apparently even when terrorizing their own dissenting countrymen). The fact that this letter did not mention the ethnic minority of Cyprus; the fact that it was printed; and the fact that its moral doctrines remained completely unanswered in a long sequence of letters on this subject, all go a long way towards proving my first thesis. Indeed, it seems to me possible that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.
The nationalist religion is strong. Many are ready to die for it, fervently believing that it is morally good, and factually true. But they are mistaken; just as mistaken as their communist bedfellows. Few creeds have created more hatred, cruelty, and senseless suffering than the belief in the righteousness of the nationality principle; and yet it is still widely believed that this principle will help to alleviate the misery of national oppression. My optimism is a little shaken, I admit, when I look at the near-unanimity with which this principle is still accepted, even today, without any hesitation, without any doubt—even by those whose political interests are clearly opposed to it. But I refuse to abandon the hope that the absurdity and cruelty of this alleged moral principle will one day be recognized by all thinking men.
But let us now leave all these sad stories of misguided moral enthusiasm, and turn to our own free world. Resisting the temptation to offer further arguments in support of my first thesis, I will now proceed to my second.
I have said that I am an optimist. Optimism as a philosophical creed is best known as the famous doctrine, elaborately defended by Leibniz, that this world of ours is the best of all possible words. I do not believe that this thesis of Leibniz is true. But I am sure you will concede me the happy title of optimist when you hear my second thesis which refers to our free world—the Society of the Atlantic Community. My second thesis is this.
In spite of our great and serious troubles, and in spite of the fact that ours is surely not the best possible society, I assert that our own free world is by far the best society which has come into existence during the course of human history.
Thus I do not say, with Leibniz, that our world is the best of all possible worlds. Nor do I say that our social world is the best of all possible social worlds. My thesis is merely that our own social world is the best that has ever been—the best, at least, of which we have any historical knowledge.
I suppose you will by now concede me the right to call myself an optimist. But you may perhaps suspect me of being a materialist—of calling our society the best because it is the wealthiest which history has ever seen.
But I can assure you that this is not the reason why I call our society the best. Admittedly, I believe it to be a great thing to have succeeded, or very nearly succeeded, in abolishing hunger and poverty. But it is neither nylons nor nutrition, neither terylene nor television, which I chiefly admire. When I call our social world ‘the best’, I have in mind the very same values which led the former Bishop of Bradford to brand it as the work of the devil, only fourteen years ago: I have in mind the standards and values which have come down to us through Christianity from Greece and from the Holy Land; from Socrates, and from the Old and New Testaments.
At no other time, and nowhere else, have men been more respected, as men, than in our society. Never before have their human rights, and their human dignity, been so respected, and never before have so many been ready to bring great sacrifices for others, especially for those less fortunate than themselves.
I believe that these are facts.
But before examining these facts more closely, I wish to stress that I am very much alive to other facts also. Power still corrupts, even in our world. Civil servants still behave at times like uncivil masters. Pocket dictators still abound; and a normally intelligent man seeking medical advice must be prepared to be treated as a rather tiresome type of imbecile, if he betrays an intelligent interest—that is, a critical interest—in his physical condition.
But all this is not so much due to lack of good intentions as to clumsiness and sheer incompetence. And there is much to balance it. For example, in some countries belonging to the free world (I am thinking of Belgium), hospital services are being most successfully reorganized with the obvious aim of making them pleasant rather than depressing places, with due consideration for the sensitive, and for those whose self-respect may be wounded by practices now prevailing. And it is realized there how important it is to establish a genuine and intelligent co-operation between doctor and patient, and to ensure that a man, even a sick man, should never be encouraged to surrender his final responsibility for himself.
But let us turn to larger problems. Our free world has very nearly, if not completely, succeeded in abolishing the greatest evils which have hitherto beset the social life of man.
Let me give you a list of what I believe to be some of the greatest of those evils which can be remedied, or relieved, by social co-operation: They are:
Let us see what has been achieved; not only here in Great Britain, through the Welfare State, but by one method or another everywhere in the free world.
Abject poverty has been practically abolished. Instead of being a mass phenomenon, the problem has almost become one of detecting the isolated cases which still persist.
The problems of unemployment and of some other forms of insecurity have changed completely. We are now faced with new problems brought into being by the fact that the problem of mass-unemployment has largely been solved.
Fairly continuous progress is being made in dealing with the problems of sickness and pain.
Penal reform has largely abolished cruelty in this field.
The story of the successful fight against slavery has become the everlasting pride of this country and of the United States.
Religious discrimination has practically disappeared. Racial discrimination has diminished to an extent surpassing the hopes of the most hopeful. What makes these two achievements even more astonishing is the fact that religious prejudices, and even more so racial prejudices, are probably as widespread as they were fifty years ago, or very nearly so.
The problem of educational opportunities is still very serious, but it is being tackled sincerely and with energy.
Class differences have diminished enormously everywhere. In Scandinavia, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, we have, in fact, something approaching classless societies.
My eighth point was war. This point I must discuss more fully. It may be best to formulate what I have to say here as my third thesis.
My third thesis is that since the time of the Boer War, none of the democratic governments of the free world has been in a position to wage a war of aggression. No democratic government would be united upon the issue, because they would not have the nation united behind them. Aggressive war has become almost a moral impossibility.3
The Boer War led to a revulsion of feeling in Great Britain, amounting to a moral conversion in favour of peace. It was because of this attitude that Great Britain hesitated to resist the Kaiser, and that it entered the first world war only after the violation of Belgium. It was under its influence that Britain was ready to make allowances for Hitler. When Hitler’s army entered the Rhineland, this was undeniably an act of aggression on his part. Yet public opinion in this country made it impossible for the Government to meet the challenge—although it would have been the most reasonable course to take, under the circumstances. On the other hand, Mussolini’s open attack on Ethiopia so much outraged British public opinion that the Hoare-Laval plan, which wisely tried to keep Mussolini and Hitler apart, was swept away by an outburst of public indignation.
But a still stronger example is the public attitude towards the issue of preventive war against Russia. You may remember that, around 1950, even Bertrand Russell advocated a preventive war. And it must be admitted that there were strong reasons in favour of it. Russia was not yet in possession of an atomic arsenal; and it was the last opportunity of preventing Russia from acquiring the hydrogen bomb.
I do not envy the American President his power to decide between such terrible alternatives. The one alternative was to begin a war. The other was to allow Stalin to acquire the power to destroy the world; a power with which he certainly ought not to have been entrusted. Bertrand Russell was no doubt right in maintaining that from a purely rational point of view the second alternative was even worse than the first. But the decision went the other way. An aggressive war, even in these crucial circumstances, and with the then practical certainty of victory, had become morally impossible.
The free world is still ready to go to war. It is ready to go to war against heavy odds, as it has done more than once in the past. But it will do this only if faced with unambiguous aggression. Thus as far as the free world itself is concerned war has been conquered.
I have briefly discussed my list of eight great social evils.
I believe that it is most important to say what the free world has achieved. For we have become unduly sceptical about ourselves. We are suspicious of anything like self-righteousness, and we find self-praise unpalatable. One of the great things we have learned is not only to be tolerant of others, but to ask ourselves seriously whether the other fellow is not perhaps in the right, and altogether the better man. We have learned the fundamental moral truth that nobody should be judge in his own cause. This, no doubt, is a symptom of a certain moral maturity; yet one may learn a lesson too well. Having discovered the sin of self-righteousness, we have fallen into its stereotyped inversion: into a stereotyped pose of self-depreciation, of inverted smugness. Having learned that one should not be judge in one’s own cause, we are tempted to become advocates for our opponents. Thus we become blind to our own achievements. But this tendency must be resisted.
When Mr Krushchev on his Indian tour indicted British colonialism, he was no doubt convinced of the truth of all he said. I do not know whether he was aware that his accusations were derived, via Lenin, largely from British sources. Had he known it, he would probably have taken it as an additional reason for believing in what he was saying. But he would have been mistaken; for this kind of self-accusation is a peculiarly British virtue as well as a peculiarly British vice. The truth is that the idea of India’s freedom was born in Great Britain; as was the general idea of political freedom in modern times. And those Britishers who provided Lenin and Mr Krushchev with their moral ammunition were closely connected, or even identical, with those Britishers who gave India the idea of freedom.
I shall always regret that the great British statesman who answered Mr Krushchev had so little to say for himself, and for our different way of life. I am quite sure that he made no impression at all on Mr Krushchev. But I think he could have done so. Had he pointed to the difference between our free world and the communist world by way of the following example, I am sure Mr Krushchev would have understood him. Our statesman might have spoken thus:
‘The difference between your country and mine can be explained as follows. Imagine that my chief, Sir Anthony, suddenly dies tomorrow. I can assure you that in our country nobody in his senses would even for a moment consider the possibility that I had murdered Sir Anthony. Not even a British communist would think so. This illustrates the simple difference between our respective ways of conducting our affairs. It is not a racial difference, to be sure, for we may learn from Shakespeare that not so very long ago we too conducted our affairs in that other manner.’
I believe in the importance of answering all those absurd but terrible accusations against Great Britain, often originating from British sources, which are current in the world today. For I believe in the power of ideas, including the power of false and pernicious ideas. And I believe in what I might call the war of ideas.
The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with words instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions. And this habit of fighting with words and ideas is one of the few things which still unite the worlds on the two sides of the Iron Curtain (although on the other side, words have only inadequately replaced swords, and are sometimes used to prepare for the kill). To see how powerful ideas have become since the days of the Greeks, we only need to remember that all religious wars were wars of ideas, and that all revolutions were revolutions of ideas. Although these ideas were more often false and pernicious than true and beneficial there is perhaps a certain tendency for some of the better ones to survive, provided they find sufficiently powerful and intelligent support.
All this may be formulated in my fourth thesis. It is as follows.
The power of ideas, and especially of moral and religious ideas, is at least as important as that of physical resources.
I am well aware of the fact that some students of politics are strongly opposed to this thesis; that there is an influential school of so-called political realists who declare that ‘ideologies’, as they call them, have little influence upon political reality, and that whatever influence they have must be pernicious. But I do not think that this is a tenable view. Were it true, Christianity would have had no influence on history; and the United States would be inexplicable, or merely the result of a pernicious mistake.
My fourth thesis, the doctrine of the power of ideas, is characteristic of the liberal and rationalist thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But the liberal movement did not believe only in the power of ideas. It also upheld a view which I consider mistaken. It believed that there was little need for competing ideas to join battle. This was because it supposed that truth, once put forward, would always be recognized. It believed in the theory that truth is manifest—that it cannot be missed once the powers which are interested in its suppression and perversion are destroyed.
This important and influential idea—that truth is manifest—is one form of optimism which I cannot support. I am convinced that it is mistaken, and that, on the contrary, truth is hard, and often painful, to come by. This, then, is my fifth thesis.
Truth is hard to come by.
This thesis explains to some extent the wars of religion. And although it is a piece of epistemology, it can throw much light upon the history of Europe since the Renaissance, and even since classical antiquity.
Let me now, in the time that remains, try to give a brief glimpse of this history—of the history of our time, especially since the Renaissance and the Reformation.
The Renaissance, and the Reformation, may be considered as the conflict between the idea that truth is manifest—that it is an open book, there to be read by anybody of good will—and the idea that truth is hidden: that it is discernible only by the elect; that the book must be deciphered only by the ministry of the Church, and interpreted only by its authority.
Although ‘the book’ meant, in the first instance, the Bible, it subsequently came to mean the book of nature. This book of nature, Bacon believed, was an open book. Those who misread it were misled by prejudice, impatience, and ‘anticipation’. If only you will read it without prejudice, patiently, and without anticipating the text, you will not err. Error is always your own fault. It is your own perverse and sinful refusal to see the truth which is manifest before you.
This naïve and, I believe, mistaken view that truth is manifest became the inspiration for the advancement of learning in modern times. It became the basis of modern rationalism, as opposed to the more sceptical classical rationalism of the Greeks.
In the field of social ideas, the doctrine that truth is manifest leads to the doctrines of individual moral and intellectual responsibility and of freedom; it leads to individualism, and to a rationalist liberalism. This doctrine makes the spiritual authority of the Church and its interpretation of the truth superfluous, and even pernicious.
A more sceptical attitude towards truth, on the other hand, leads to an emphasis upon the authority of the Church, and to other forms of authoritarianism. For if the truth is not manifest, then you cannot leave it to each individual to interpret it; for this would of necessity lead to chaos, to social disintegration, to religious schisms, and to religious wars. Thus the book must be interpreted by an over-riding authority.
The issue here can be described as one between individualistic rationalism and authoritarian traditionalism.
The issue between rationalism and authoritarian traditionalism can also be described as that between, on the one hand, faith in man, in human goodness as well as in human reason, and, on the other hand, distrust of man, of his goodness and of his reason.
I may confess that in the issue between faith in man and distrust of man, my feelings are all on the side of the naïve liberal optimists, even though my reason tells me that their epistemology was all wrong, and that truth is in fact hard to come by. I am repelled by the idea of keeping men under tutelage and authority. But I must admit, on the other hand, that the pessimists who feared the decline of authority and tradition were wise men. The terrible experience of the great religious wars, and of the French and Russian revolutions, prove their wisdom and foresight.
But although these wars and revolutions prove that the cautious pessimists were wise, they do not prove that they were right. On the contrary, the verdict of history—I mean, of course, the history of our time—seems, by and large, to favour those who had faith in man and in human reason.
For the society of our free world since the Reformation has indeed seen a decline of authority without parallel in any other epoch. It is a society without authority, or, as one might call it, a fatherless society.
The Reformation, by stressing the conscience of the individual, has dethroned God as the responsible ruler of Man’s world: God can only rule in our hearts, and through our hearts. The Protestant believes that it is through his own human conscience that God rules the world. The responsibility for the world is mine and yours: this is the Protestant faith; and the Bishop of Bradford spoke as a good Protestant when he appealed to his ministers to destroy a social world which was the work of the devil.
But the authoritarians and traditionalists were convinced that a non-authoritarian or fatherless society must spell the destruction of all human values. They were wise, I have said, and in a way they were the better epistemologists. And yet, they were wrong. For there were other revolutions, the Glorious Revolution, and the American Revolution. And there is our present free world, our Atlantic Community. It is a fatherless society ruled by the interplay of our own individual consciences. And, as I have tried to convince you, it is the best society that has ever existed.
What was the mistake of the authoritarians? Why must their wisdom be rejected? I believe that there are three elements in our free world which have successfully replaced the dethroned authority.
The first is our respect for the authority of truth: of an impersonal, interpersonal, objective truth which it is our task to find, and which it is not in our power to change, or to interpret to our liking.
The second is a lesson learnt in the religious wars. For I think that in these wars we did learn our lesson: we did learn from our mistakes (though in the social and political field this seems a rare and difficult thing). We learnt that religious faith and other convictions can only be of value when they are freely and sincerely held, and that the attempt to force men to conform was pointless because those who resisted were the best, and indeed the only ones whose assent was worth having. Thus we learnt not only to tolerate beliefs that differ from ours, but to respect them and the men who sincerely held them. But this means that we slowly began to differentiate between sincerity and dogmatic stubbornness or laziness, and to recognize the great truth that truth is not manifest, not plainly visible to all who ardently want to see it, but hard to come by. And we learnt that we must not draw authoritarian conclusions from this great truth but, on the contrary, suspect all those who claim that they are authorized to teach the truth.
The third is that we have also learnt that by listening to one another, and criticizing one another, we may get nearer to the truth.
I believe that this critical form of rationalism and, above all, this belief in the authority of objective truth is indispensable for a free society based on mutual respect. (This is why it is important not to let our thoughts be seriously influenced by such intellectual misunderstandings as relativism and irrationalism, the understandable results of disappointment with dogmatism and authoritarianism.)
But this critical approach makes room, at the same time, for a reconciliation between rationalism and traditionalism. The critical rationalist can appreciate traditions, for although he believes in truth, he does not believe that he himself is in certain possession of it. He can appreciate every step, every approach towards it, as valuable, indeed as invaluable; and he can see that our traditions often help to encourage such steps, and also that without an intellectual tradition the individual could hardly take a single step towards the truth. It is thus the critical approach to rationalism, the compromise between rationalism and scepticism, which for a long time has been the basis of the British middle way: the respect for traditions, and at the same time the recognition of the need to reform them.
What the future will bring us, we do not know. But the achievements of the past and of our own time show us what is humanly possible. And they can teach us that although ideas are dangerous we may learn from our mistakes how to handle them; how to approach them critically, how to tame them, and how to use them in our struggles, including our struggle to get a little nearer to the hidden truth.
The Sixth Eleanor Rathbone Memorial lecture, delivered at the University of Bristol on October 12th 1956. (Not previously published.)
1 See my Poverty of Historicism, 1957; and ch. 16.
2 The pamphlet is Christians in the Class Struggle, by Gilbert Cope, with a Foreword by the Bishop of Bradford, 1942. Cp. my Open Society and its Enemies (1950 and later editions), notes 3 to ch. 1 and 12 to ch. 9.
3 This lecture was delivered before the Suez adventure. It seems to me that the sad history of this adventure supports my first three theses.