The World Set Free

Section 11

Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes at least as unprecedented.  It is not as if old things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and over-developed.  He has not so much grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the light.  Such turnings round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive scale before.  The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men.  There was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries.  The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country before the years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum.  Yet there were no real differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds; their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and habits of mind.  And turning to more individual instances the constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.  To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they were ready for new associations.  The council carried them forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back to an endless chain of evils.  But his task would have been a harder one than the council’s.  The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity for reconstruction.  The litigious and trading spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at last the weeds revived again and ‘claims’ began to sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing sunshine of a transforming world.  A new literature, a new interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young.  The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made his demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred million pounds.  That was the ingenuous Dass’s idea of justice, that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually because he had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten’s discoveries.  Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private hospital at Nice.  Both of these men would probably have ended their days enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just this novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.

The new government early discovered the need of a universal education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal rule.  It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of religious profession that at that time divided the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left these organisations to make their peace with God in their own time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common duty and occupation of all men and women.  These things which are now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt, that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.

The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during the next few decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness.  This educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the mental and spiritual side of the redistribution committee.  And prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in being a congenital cripple.  His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at last to undergo two operations.  The second killed him.  Already malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world.  It had a curious effect upon Karenin’s colleagues; their feeling towards him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed usage rather than reason to overcome.  He had a strong face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped mouth.  His skin was very yellow and wrinkled, and his hair iron gray.  He was at all times an impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust through his being.  At the end of his life his personal prestige was very great.  To him far more than to any contemporary is it due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world spirit, was made the basis of universal education.  That general memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern educational system, was probably entirely his work.

‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,’ he wrote.  ’That is the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point of all we have to do.  It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain statement of fact.  It is the basis for your work.  You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.  Education is the release of man from self.  You have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge their sympathies.  That is what you are for.  Under your guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the universe.  The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose.  And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously yourselves.  Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill, every sort of service, love:  these are the means of salvation from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from God….’