Part 2
Facts brought to light in the sphere of industry have an application in politics, so to politics and the arts of government let us turn. Let politicians consider, for example, the discovery that the incidence of shell-shock in war, and of nervous disorders in peace, is highest in the dangerous occupations which are also the occupations most liable to industrial unrest. Such facts prevent us from viewing the discontented worker either as a martyred idealist, or as a mere criminal. The case is paralleled by the suggestion that desertion and malingering in exhausted armies are symptoms or ‘defence reactions’ in incipient shell-shock. They force upon us a more dispassionate and a more therapeutic point of view. The criminal in general is coming to be regarded in this light. Turn now to the anarchist, and the psycho-analyst explains to you that his activities are minor symptoms of his ‘father complex’, which imprisonment, for example, will merely intensify.
From knowledge of the conditions of these things proceeds control. Possibly punitive measures may be genuinely counteracting causes. Perhaps, however, empirical science may declare that the best treatment for an anarchist is to make him a Lord Mayor, and the best remedy for a militant labour party is a term of office judiciously supervised by our permanent officials. The future student of social affairs will be preoccupied with the scientific investigation of the sources of power and its social reservoirs. The ‘party in power’, as it is charitably called, has not much of it. Public opinion seems to have much more. In fact, the chief function of a government, now-a-days, seems to be that of carrying out the programme of the opposition.[6] The opposition is relatively free from criticism; the Government moves in dread of it, being threatened by attrition in its bye-elections and by a general landslide at any appeal to the country.
[6] We have recently witnessed a paralysed Labour Government incapable of carrying out its projected remedies for industrial ills, and a Conservative Government maintaining a system of Free Trade.
Under such conditions the essential tasks of government are very much the same of whatever political colour the party in power may be. First and foremost it has to deal with emergencies, whether spontaneously arising or organized by the opposition, in such a way as to preserve its popularity with the public. It has also to carry out more or less efficiently the routine work of government, and it has to prepare for the next election by enshrining its most permanent tactical advantages within the framework of the Constitution. Any time and energy that may be left can be devoted to carrying out its ‘programme’ and in dealing with what it conceives to be the fundamental disorders of society.
A ‘party programme’, like a dream, has a manifest and a latent content. The manifest content is drawn from the incidents of the day and popular demands. The latent is constituted by those deeper policies for the furtherance of which this clap-trap may be closed. The distinction between the manifest and the latent content is not due, as is frequently asserted, to mere political dishonesty but to the necessities of the case; the primitive group mind’s need of a ‘Cause’ and of an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual economic doctrine. With the increased complexity and scientific character which the latent content is, in future, likely to assume political sacramentalism will become more and more important.
How will this affect the issue of our present discontents? Viewing the situation frankly, we find in society two powerful and opposed forces. Let us adopt the convenient labels and call them Capital and Labour. It would take us too far afield to discuss in detail the prospects of success in each of the various remedies suggested for their enmity. In general, it seems to me that all the proposals depend for their success upon large-scale persuasion, and ignore the fundamental causes of unrest and conflict. Even labour, it seems to me, is mistaken about the causes of its troubles, and labour might be expected to know them best. But even to ask this would be as unreasonable as to ask a patient to diagnose and prescribe for his own disease. The solution, I venture to think, will come along the lines upon which the only solution of any problem has ever before been found――along the lines of exact and scientific thought and piecemeal investigation. The recognition of this combined with attention to the apparent power of public opinion in modern politics has led many to suppose that the ultimate remedy lies in the dissemination of education, of exact and scientific thought throughout our great democracies. But, personally, I doubt the possibility of disseminating anything, least of all scientific habits or attitudes of mind. It would seem to violate the rule of differentiation. Nor can I bring myself to believe that there ever was or is ever likely to be a democracy in any important sense. It is sufficient if this scientific spirit be exploited by those who hold the reins of power, and it is because it seems that they are beginning to see the possibilities of this that I think the really significant revolution is to come. What is called ‘Public Opinion’ is now-a-days a carefully manufactured article produced by firms entirely outside the scope of the Factory Acts. Of course, even a despotism is a ‘democracy’ in the unimportant sense that the despot’s rule depends upon a certain kind of consent. What has happened lately is that a new kind of leader has been evolved. The old leader ruled by certain kind of obvious strength. The new ruler practices an art. He is moreover, a student of the science of persuasion. He appeals through various media directly to the masses, and does not so much inspire confidence as suggest that he is only a more articulate spokesman of their will. The contrast is rather like that between coercion and hypnotism, two obvious ways of making people do as you wish; and the transition from one to the other does not seem to me to be adequately described as a passage to democracy.
The future, it seems, will see these powers scientifically employed. Much has been learnt by crude empirical methods. The newspapers, the advertising agencies, and the publicity departments have a store of knowledge upon which politicians are wisely beginning to draw. Soon they may attend to Mr Bertrand Russell, who in his prophetic volume, foresees the development of glandular psychology. We know that by suitable injections a person’s emotional mood can be changed, and Russell suggests that a simple operation like compulsory vaccination will convert the reddest Bolshevic to the temperament of the mildest curate. The glands of docility will be under government control.
The suggestion appears to me to be over-simple, and to belong to the mechanistic type of prophecy. Its supreme simplicity is in this connection its supreme defect. The only defence against democracy is a complicated mode of government. If methods of government are foolproof then any one can practice it; and a sudden _coup d’état_, or an invasion of half-a-dozen uninoculated savages, would be an irrevocable disaster.
It is, I think, mainly through the development of scientifically conducted propaganda that the world may one day see the abandonment of force. No wholesale change of heart will be involved. It will simply be that a more efficient weapon will have been discovered, a weapon that is preventive as well as corrective in its use.
The military mind is, it is generally agreed, conservative to the verge of sheer stupidity, but even the military mind is becoming infected with the new ideas. Under the influence of Captain Liddel Hart, the military representative of the prophetic school with which we are concerned, it will surely come to recognize “the moral objective of war.”[7] Even this author is conservative, in regarding tanks and aeroplanes as being the principal weapons of the future. With regard to the immediate future he may be right. But the implication of his general thesis is that all these weapons will ultimately give place to subtler ones of psychological design. Hardly less effective than the ‘death ray’ in bending the enemy’s will is the rumour that one has been invented. And rumours can be invented daily in His Majesty’s Office of Propaganda. And why stop at the control of fear? Why not apply psychology throughout the whole of the enemy’s mental life? Perhaps, in the last of all wars to end war, victory will fall to the side which first makes its enemy laugh. The power of a sense of humour, at any rate, is a terrible weapon in the negotiation of peace. Our late enemies would scarcely have fared so badly had they been less sparingly endowed with it in war.
[7] See _Paris, or the Future of War_.
Humour has its applications in peace as in war. Under universal Scientific Management, the Government will vie with the underground railways for the control of public laughter. The Catholic Church, in enlisting the aid of Chesterton and Ronald Knox against its irrefutable but dreary adversaries, has for once in modern history placed itself in the vanguard of a winning cause.
The weapon has curious possibilities, but is one difficult to employ. Quick wits sensitive to the trend of fashion are the essential qualifications for a Minister of Public Humour. For the joke is the most ephemeral of all works of art. It takes years of patient research, now, to see the jokes of classical antiquity, and pages of solemn argument to defend the taste of Shakespeare in his humour. Differences of humour separate age from age and class from class. It is the weakest link which binds the intellectuals to the cause of labour. One might expect this weapon to favour established institutions, for only the fat and prosperous can laugh with merriment, but by the same token the jokes of Marie Antoinette were unintelligible to the hungry. Therefore the lean and plodding journalists will come into their own and take their place among the expert advisors to the future Ministry of Talents.
IV
Education will perhaps be one of the most interesting fields of future scientific management. At present we know a few bits of a few sciences, and a handful of historical facts. We fill the picture out with theories and blunderingly try to make other people memorize these things. We call the process Education. We have invented a few devices for discovering what they forget, and call them Examinations. Recently we have invented a few tricks of exposing what they cannot do, and we call them Mental Tests. We wrap it all up in a tangle of loose philosophy, and we call it The Science of Education. We profess, it is true, some loftier pursuits. We are trying, we say, to teach our pupils to think. We try to mould their characters, and we try to produce good citizens.
But what does it all amount to in the end? The most successful way yet discovered of teaching people to think is for the teacher himself to think aloud, and hope that his pupils will catch the knack. How do we set about moulding the character of a child? By moral precept, good example, healthy sport, uplifting atmosphere, and an unprincipled application of punishment and reward. Our children are bored by precepts. They yawn in our presence and make fun of our precepts in our absence; they break out at the first opportunity and “sow their wild oats”, and then rediscover our old morality for themselves. The more adventurous invent a new one of their own, probably a finer thing than that we tried to teach. Our good examples produce two alternative effects. If the child happens to like us, he will imitate our actions, and morality becomes an empty mimicry. Perhaps, on the other hand, we have an unfortunate mannerism or some innocent resemblance to a forgotten terror, and the child dislikes us. The good example is taken as a pattern of the thing to be avoided. By counter-suggestion he takes the opposite course so far as in him lies. The sons of clergymen might provide us with material for a theory of moral education.
Our healthy sports――but why go on? It is not my intention to ridicule the best things that the wisdom of the ages has produced. My only contention is that our methods of education are hopelessly tentative, uncertain in their effects, justifiable only on the ground that we cannot yet see clearly anything else to do. But things will change. Already there _is_ a science of education, because people with scientific minds are thinking about the problems it presents. They are experimenting, and they are at least disclosing our ignorance. Experiments similar to those of Scientific Management are producing similar results. We are beginning to know important things about the mind, its natural development, and the method by which it works. Already we know a good deal about the conditions of remembering, enough at least to condemn, if we dared to think out the implications of our knowledge, many venerable educational practices. Some of the most important of our discoveries fall readily into line with the results of Industrial Psychology. There seems, for example, to be a natural rate of working appropriate in learning, appropriate rhythms of impression, rest and recall, by the operation of which knowledge becomes firmly embedded in the mind. When these rhythms are ignored, the evil effects of cramming are produced. Our educational methods in the school and in the university break and crush all these rhythms, and students pass out into the world with mutilated minds.
The rhythms of life, however, present in every field possibilities of extensive modification. That many needs demand a rhythmic satisfaction is well known, but there is scope for detailed investigation and experiment here. None of these natural periods seem to be absolutely fixed beyond all power of alteration. The rhythms of digestion probably vary with the fashions of the age and class, according as high teas or late dinners are in fashion. They might under certain conditions have depended upon the tides; and changes in our habits of taking nourishment would probably produce most interesting variations.
Why should we sleep throughout the night, and work throughout the day? Our habits in this respect were formed in the days before fire was stolen from the gods――and they are wasteful habits, too. Artificial light one day may easily come to be as cheap as water, and man will change his ways of taking rest. Some experimenters urge that the most valuable part of sleep is in the first few minutes. The remainder of the night we spend in dreams and in gradually waking up. Let us apply the principle of rest-pauses in a thorough-going way. Distributed periods of sleep might prove a great economy. People will be taught to recline say once in every two hours, and sleep for twenty minutes. Thus will be inaugurated the twenty-four hour day, and a race of energetic Napoleons will emerge.
But to return to general education. Why should the period of learning be concentrated wholly in the early years of life? Distributed periods of study will undoubtedly prove more effective, say two hours every day, or two days every week, or, if you like, two continuous months in the year throughout the whole of life. Thus might come the solution to a variety of problems. We have, first of all, the problems of education itself. At present we arrange the life of a child so that a period of intensive cramming is followed by the abrupt cessation of intellectual life at the time when the intellect is just beginning to mature. There is the problem of industrial fatigue, due more often to monotony than to arduous labour. Recent researches afford scientific support to the adage that a change of work is as good as a holiday. Educational pursuits will provide the necessary change. Already many working men spend their evenings at classes and their only holiday at a summer school.
Lastly there is the ever-growing problem of the prolongation of infancy. Under simpler conditions a child was adequately equipped for practical purposes by the age of ten or even younger. Now-a-days fourteen years is considered necessary, whilst the professional man is almost thirty before he is fit to earn a living――and still there is more to learn.
Given successful scientific research in this direction, back we go to the methods of the early days of the Industrial Revolution with children employed in every factory. Under rational supervision it may prove a great advance. The moral education which practical life alone can give will commence at the proper time. Children will be protected from the dangers of neglectful or over-solicitous parents. They will acquire at an early age the much-required sense of responsibility and independence, and their parallel work at school will acquire some semblance of significance and interest.
In addition to new rhythms and periods of study, new methods will be employed. Probably the curriculum itself will be the first thing to be revised. In spite of a good deal of relevant knowledge, no one has yet consistently thought out an answer to the question: What should a child be taught? Freed from the assumptions of faculty-psychology and from its present entanglements with external systems of examination, the course of studies prescribed for the ordinary child would omit much that is now included and include much that is now ignored. Moreover, the order of presentation both of subjects and of the material in each subject will undergo extensive alteration. Changes in this respect have already well begun, and changes blindly initiated move towards enlightenment.
Things are moving towards a triple control of the individual life, one that roughly corresponds to the old control of the Church and State, with the added partnership of organized industry. To the modern representative of the Church――whatever ultimate form this institution may take――belongs the function of guiding the individual for his own personal good. It is a service which the Church might easily have continued to perform, but for its insistence upon doctrinal terms. What was in effect a kind of strike of the religious ministry, met by boycott on the side of the general public, has led to the development of black leg service on the part of psychoanalysis and disinterested teachers. At present the organization manifests all the muddle of an emergency supply. Children in over-crowded schools cannot obtain adequate individual guidance, and the work of the psychoanalyst is curative only in exceptional cases, and not, as it should be, universally preventive. Nevertheless, feeling moves in the direction of agreement that something more must be done, though as yet nothing like a constructive policy of personal guidance has emerged.
The activities of the State in this connection are likely to increase. In earlier days a man could be born, could live and die in comparative privacy. Now, official notice is taken at least of his birth, his marriage, his income, most of his crimes, some at least of his diseases; and his death, too, is registered. The registration of particulars about the individual will extend to educational records, abilities and disabilities, and of all that is relevant to his social life. Much of this will be done by institutions of the kind which our present “vocational bureaus” dimly and crudely foreshadow. Ultimately a public service more or less State-controlled will be developed to mediate between Education and Industry. When life becomes more fully organized into a system of interlacing rhythms, the unit of the secondary Educational System will be an institution embracing factory, school, and clinic under a single board of control with its industrial, educational and medical representatives; and the threefold plan will no doubt be adopted in both the higher and lower grades.
Early in life some of the main tendencies and abilities of the child will be diagnosed and he will be sent to the appropriate school and industry. Doubtful and obscure cases will, with the “allround” types, be sent for a “general education”, in the course of which, however, they will come under more careful examination. By the age of ten or twelve the child’s future course should in outline and general character be fairly clearly known, and by sixteen he will have become more or less specialized to a certain type of course. Not, however, completely specialized. To meet the problem of trade-fluctuations and consequent unemployment, and as a preventive of industrial monotony, each person will probably be taught a variety of pursuits, achieving a balance appropriate to each case of mental and manual work. The system of multiple vocations would probably be operated in conjunction with some form of industrial conscription; for increased wisdom in government should by this time have undermined popular prejudice on this score.
At the prospect of such extensive changes in our educational institutions one wonders what is going to happen to our ancient and venerable universities. They might, consistently with all that has been said, preserve their functions as specialized seats of learning; but it is more likely that long before a rational system of education has been evolved they will have changed their character beyond all recognition. In optimistic, but perhaps short-sighted, moments, it is commonly supposed that with the increasing demand for education their future is assured, and that they will assume ever-increasing importance and enjoy ever-growing popularity and respect.
Let us, however, for a moment consider the instructive parallel of the Holy Catholic Church, the unfortunate history of which is a byword at the present day. The causes of its decline do not, I think, include one that is frequently suggested. Men are not to-day less religious or less in need of its holy offices. The change has come about not by decreased demands but by competition and an augmented supply. Men still need the things of which the Church once held an almost complete monopoly. They need some sort of philosophy, some personal guidance in the difficult art of the moral life, and many other things which once the Church alone could give.
The invention of the Press made possible the novelist. The novelist found himself adopted as guide, philosopher, and friend. The younger generation now-a-days acquires its general outlook from the novelists and playwrights, who exercise an almost sacerdotal influence. Personal guidance is offered by the psychoanalyst. He exercises the priestly functions of the confessional and of exorcizing demons; whilst Coué and his disciples offer a new technique of prayer. The validity of these practices is not here my subject, but the fact that people are getting what they want. Such new ways of meeting old demands are continually being found, and may not the Universities soon find themselves in the position of the Church? Several things would make the suggestion plausible.
In the first place, education is already being purveyed as a commercial product. Quite apart from the self-educators produced fortnightly by the Press, there are Mind-training Institutes and Correspondence Colleges. Universities at the present time can afford to ignore this competition. They have, they think, the pull in traditional prestige, the advantages of the tutorial system, the general atmosphere of culture, and they have, we trust, at present the most distinguished scholars. But traditional prestige is a slippery foundation for any institution now-a-days. The test that is being applied is that of practical efficiency. Already happy-go-lucky methods in University finance are being examined by Royal Commissions and by financial experts. The next thing will be that they will start to scrutinize the educational methods being employed. Already, moreover, the newer institutions are being forced to mould themselves upon the model of an up-to-date business office. Soon they will adopt those well-proven adjuncts of commercial progress――modern methods of advertisement, for instance.