Man has thereby become an educable creature and fallen a victim to the arts of the examiner. Provided the mechanisms of education do not get out of gear, it is hard to set limits to the amounts of knowledge with which he can be crammed; but it is clear that they are far greater than he could ever have acquired in a lifetime for himself. And as education (of sorts) has now become world wide, it might seem that the future of knowledge was now assured, and no longer liable to setbacks such as those due to the famous burning of the library of Alexandria at the command of the Caliph Omar, or the extinction of the only Greek scientists who seriously concerned themselves with the applications of science to life, of Archimedes and his School, in the sack of Syracuse. At any rate, it seemed clear that progress in knowledge could continue indefinitely, even in an otherwise stationary or decadent society.
Whoever argued thus would fail to make sufficient allowance for the perversity of human nature. Human institutions, like the human body, are ever tending to get clogged with the waste products of their own working. Hence, so far from performing the functions for which they were intended, they are constantly becoming the most formidable instruments for their frustration. Experience shows how easily Churches become the most effective deadeners of religious zeal, how often Law becomes the negation of justice, how deadly is the School to the inborn craving for knowledge which seemed to Aristotle so characteristic of man’s nature.
Accordingly, no one familiar with the actual working of academic institutions is likely to fall into the error of pinning his faith to them. They are, of course, designed for the purpose of preserving and promoting the highest and most advanced knowledge hitherto attained: but do they anywhere fulfil this purpose? Its execution must of necessity be left to professors not exempt from human frailty, always selected by more or less defective methods, whose interests by no means coincide with those of their subjects. The interest of the subject is to become more widely understood and so more influential. The interest of the professor is to become more unassailable, and so more authoritative. He achieves this by becoming more technical. For the more technical he gets, the fewer can comprehend him; the fewer are competent to criticize him, the more of an oracle he becomes; if, therefore, he wishes for an easy life of undisturbed academic leisure, the more he will indulge his natural tendency to grow more technical as his knowledge grows, the more he will turn away from those aspects of his subject which have any direct practical or human interest. He will wrap himself in mysteries of technical jargon, and become as nearly as possible unintelligible. Truly, as William James once exclaimed to me, apropos of the policy of certain philosophers, “the natural enemy of any subject is the professor thereof!” It is clear that if these tendencies are allowed to prevail, every subject must in course of time become unteachable, and not worth learning.
Thus educational systems become the chief enemies of education, and seats of learning the chief obstacles to the growth of knowledge, while in an otherwise stagnant or decadent society these tendencies sooner or later get the upper hand and utterly corrupt the social memory. The power of the professor is revealed not so much by the things he teaches, as by the things he fails or refuses to teach.
History is full of examples. How many religions have not perished from ritual sclerosis, how many sciences have not been degraded into pseudo-sciences or games! Logic has been just examinable nonsense for over two thousand years. The present economic chaos in the world has been indirectly brought about by the policy adopted by the professors of economics forty or fifty years ago, to suit their own convenience. For they then decided that they must escape from the unwelcome attentions of the public by becoming more ‘scientific’; i.e. they ceased to express themselves in plain language and took to mathematical formulae and curves instead; with the result that the world promptly relapsed into its primitive depths of economic ignorance. So soon as the professors had retired from it, every economic heresy and delusion, which had been exposed and uprooted by Adam Smith, at once revived and flourished. In one generation economics disappeared completely from the public ken and the political world, and the makers of the Peace Treaties of 1919 were so incapable of understanding an economic argument that not even the lucid intelligence of Mr Keynes could dissuade them from enacting the preposterous conditions which rendered impossible the realization of their aims.[A] Nor was it so very long ago that, in order to save the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, it had to be recast, because it had degenerated into an intellectual jig-saw puzzle, wholly unrelated to the applications of mathematics to the other sciences. To avoid jealousies, I hasten to add that the University of Oxford, which has organized itself as an asylum for lost causes, skilfully cultivates, by means of its classical and historical studies, a backward-looking bias in its alumni. The true ‘Greats’ man is meant to go down indelibly imbued with the conviction that in matters of morals and politics nothing of importance has been discovered or said since Plato and Aristotle, and that nothing else matters.
Clearly then we cannot take for granted that in any society knowledge can progress without limits, nor can we count on our academic institutions to save us from stagnation and decay, even in matters of knowledge. All institutions are social mechanisms, and all mechanisms need a modicum of intelligent supervision, in the absence of which they become dangerous engines of destruction.
IV
It appears then that we can extract no guarantee of progress either from the nature of Man or from the nature of human institutions. There is no law of progress, if by law be meant a superior power able to coerce the creatures that are said to ‘obey’ it. Neither can we extract from history any proof of the superiority of civilized man over his uncivilized ancestors. Such progress as has been attained has been achieved only by the active co-operation of the progressive organisms: every step has been fought for, and progress has ceased whenever effort ceased, or was switched off into different directions.
Consequently, modern man has no right to ‘boast himself far better than his fathers’—in intrinsic quality. Intrinsically, i.e. apart from the effects of culture and social training, it is probable that he is slightly inferior in capacity to his own ancestors, while very markedly inferior to the great races of antiquity (like the Greeks) in their hey-day. Nor is there any reason to suppose that his moral nature has changed materially. Modern man may be a little tamer and better-tempered, because he has been herded together much more closely than primitive man, and city life, even in slums, demands, and produces, a certain ‘urbanity.’ For many generations those who would not pack tight and could not stand the strain of constantly exhibiting ‘company manners’ and accommodating their action to those of their fellows, must have fled away into the wilds, where they could be independent, or have eliminated themselves in other ways, e.g. by committing murder. It is probable that the social history of Iceland, settled as it was by unbridled individualists who would not brook any form of organized government, might throw some light on this process of taming the individual.
Nevertheless there is little doubt that, in the main, humanity is still Yahoo-manity. Alike in mentality and in moral, modern man is still substantially identical with his palæolithic ancestors. He is still the irrational, impulsive, emotional, foolish, destructive, cruel, credulous, creature he always was. Normally the Yahoo in him is kept under control by the constant pressure of a variety of social institutions; but let anything upset an established social order, and the Yahoo comes to the front at once. The history of the past fifty years abundantly proves that man is still capable of atrocities equal to any in his record. Not only have we lived through the greatest political and the deadliest natural convulsion, the Great War and the Tokio earthquake, but the Russian Revolution has outdone the French and Landru the legendary Bluebeard, while for mingled atrocity and baseness the murders of Rasputin and of Alexander of Serbia are unsurpassed in history. The painful truth is that civilization has not improved Man’s moral nature. His moral habits are still mainly matters of custom, and the effect of moral theories is nugatory everywhere. Thus civilization is not even skin deep; it does not go deeper than the clothes.