Janus in Modern Life

by W. M. Flinders Petrie

Under stagnant and uniform conditions there may be a fossilised form of civilisation; but any living form must yield opportunities for individual effort, and every such opportunity is the making or marring of the man who rises to it or who falls before it. The leading tenth and the submerged tenth are equally the proof that a living civilisation is doing its work of sorting out the best and getting rid of the worst stock.

From another point of view, toleration is essential to completion. The enormous variety of character, and ability for special work, is all needed in a complete community. There are many "wrong paradises" in a whole society. We see the necessity for mental diversity, from the pure mathematician who is proud of the inapplicability of his results, through all the successive stages of research work, commercial work, administrative management, and mechanical work, even down to merely automatic work which needs no more mind than a cow's. And it is perfectly clear that such mental diversity must have corresponding variety of external life to accommodate it. The student or experimental worker finds the disturbances of communal life almost insufferable, while the mechanical worker would be miserable almost to suicide in the silence and lack of excitement of a life devoted to abstract thought or to millionths of an inch. If, therefore, the productions of the externals of life differ so profoundly in a complete society, we must expect and allow equally great differences in all the feelings, instincts, and requirements. One man may have a physical repulsion to affecting his mind and condition by stimulants and narcotics, a repulsion that extends more or less to every one addicted to such drugging of the senses. But it would be a misfortune to be without that variety, and the world would be poorer by losing Falstaff, or even Bardolph. The utmost we can say is that we should never be blind to the bad effects on the community of a low type if it be too widely diffused.

So long as the extreme parties are but a small portion, and the distribution of variation is normal, most in the middle course and thinning away to the upper and lower limits, the society is stable and benefits by its variations. But if the curve of variation is irregular, and shows two large groups with fewer in the middle course between them, the condition is dangerous. We had such a condition in England in the seventeenth century, and after a long struggle of each group to capture the middle party, the separation into two communities took place. The spiritual ancestors of Clifford and Perks and Byles were happy in their paradise of intolerant puritanism in New England, while Old England had internal peace for a couple of centuries. Another such process of fission now seems growing imminent, and it is again the question as to which group will capture the middle party. The positive danger of a diversity running into two separate groups is notorious in history. The Copts invited the Arab invasion to rid them of Byzantine bondage; the Britons invited the Saxons to save them from their neighbours. The ideals of a County Council which will not tolerate a quiet square in London, or of labour members who promote marches of the unemployed and unlimited taxation at their will, may drive the best thought in England to the tranquillity of a well-governed capital abroad; and as there are many people now who would prefer in England a Boer domination to that of the party represented by Cecil, Halifax, and Riley, so there are many others who would rather submit to a German government of London than to a sacking by a hungry mob. The segregation into two groups with an unstable link between them is fatal to the virtues classed as Patriotism. A studious Englishman would sooner have a Japanese or Russian professor for a neighbour, than have the average drinking workman and rowdy family who may be his distant cousins. And assuredly he would make no personal sacrifices to keep out of England any people who were proved to be the moral or intellectual superiors of the rest of his countrymen. We thus see that diversity, however great, must vary about a single centre, if it is to be favourable to society as a whole.

Looking at the general domination of modern law it is truly astonishing how much uniformity is possible. But the fact of a uniform law being in force must not blind us to the existence of a great amount of diversity being now tolerated side by side with it. For instance, we are so accustomed to think of only one type of marriage that the various stages recognised in Roman law seem astonishing. Yet in legal status in England there are ten stages surviving, most of which are tolerated by the law. There is (1) royal assent, needful in the royal family, just as it is needful in every family in some African communities; (2) normal religious or civil marriage; (3) marriage of divorced persons, only civil; (4) within prohibited degrees, but tolerated socially, as deceased wife's sister, or (5) not tolerated, as uncle and niece; (6) quasi-permanent connection with full legal responsibility for children; (7) temporary license. Only in case of lack of full consent does the law step in to punish, in (8) marriage under age, (9) bigamy or (10) violence. Every one of these stages has been normal in some conditions of society, and most are normal in some countries even at present. We may, for example, instance (1) normal in Benin; (2) religious marriage only normal in England; (3) normal in Eastern Europe; (4) normal in our colonies; (5) normal in Italy; (6) normal in Islam; (7) normal in Madagascar in interregnum of sovereignty, and in other countries; (8) normal in India; (9) normal in Islam; (10) normal in most warfare. And each of these stages carries with it in England different legal and social conditions. Again, as regards the period of the marriage ceremony, the Church has had a long and hard fight to get it recognised as a hymeneal ceremony and not a maternity ceremony; yet the latter status is recognised in law as equal to the former, and it is still prevalent among a third of marriages in some Australian colonies, and very largely in England, both in the country from end to end and in town life. On the whole some fifteen hundred years of church pressure has not turned the scale very far against the older custom, which we might well call approximation by trial and error. Such is the diversity which is yet uncontrolled.

We must regard society, therefore, as in the above definite subject, in the light of a mixture of many stages of evolution. We may still sit at table with palaeolithic man, put into modern dress and eating modern dishes it is true, but absolutely in the palaeolithic stage of thought and intellect; he is entirely absorbed in the interests of hunting wild animals, and devoted to his appliances for the chase, while incapable of making or improving anything belonging to a higher kind of civilisation. Crime and illegalities are very largely merely survivals of different conditions of society, which the law of the majority has not succeeded in repressing. As such, the more reasonable and favourable mode of dealing with them would be deportation to communities where such actions are still normal. Instead of five years' sentence for bigamy, let us exile a man to a Muhammedan country. If we were seriously to establish island communities where theft, violence, anarchy, and other phases incompatible with any passable diversity, were still normal and unpunished, we might leave all those who preferred to practise such conditions to work out their own life and views with kindred minds.

Regarding now the individual rather than the community, we see in modern education a very serious force acting against that diversity which is needful for progress. So far as it is a social force, owing to the herding together of large masses of children, and so destroying family types, it is mainly deleterious. The enforcement of trivial and senseless regulations by boys themselves is entirely a detriment to character, as destroying a habit of dealing with matters on their own merits, and creating a terrible bogey of senseless public opinion. The compulsory games and the ordering of the use of personal time, is another detriment, for it certainly destroys some ability which might find its footing in the character permanently. But beside the detriment of the system of herding, there is the more direct question of the influence of the teaching. Most children begin with a great curiosity concerning the world and their experience of it, a curiosity which when unguided leads to many unpleasant and inconvenient results. Hence, instead of guiding it aright, and encouraging the benefits of it, the selfish and lazy plan of elders is to destroy and obliterate the reasoning interest in things, and try to enforce in its place a knowledge of matters, which are generally less useful, and certainly less interesting, than those which a child wants to know about. The leading factor of character, the acquisition of knowledge of benefits and injuries, of good and of evil, is mainly rooted out; and the new plants of abstract ideas and bookwork require generally many years to take good root, if they do so at all. This system lies at the base of the unintellectual character of the average educated Englishman, who takes no useful interest in anything. As an example of this, there is a foreign land full of interest, scientific, historical, and social; for a quarter of a century hundreds of Englishmen have been there in comfortable official positions with reasonable leisure. Yet there is not a single good memoir produced, not even a hundred pages of original matter, outside of official work, by all this mass of educated minds during nearly a generation. The possibility of what might have been done in such grand opportunities has been stamped out by the education which they have suffered. They are all of regulation pattern, with as little variation as is possible between different temperaments—amiable upright men, who will leave no trace of anyone being the wiser in future for their existence. Such is the product of the numbing chill of uniformity, and the weeding out of the advancing power of diversity.

We are all familiar with the epigram of England having a hundred religions but only one sauce; but we see a worse misfortune in the absurd incongruity of now having two hundred religions and only one system of elementary education. Amid the great variety of minds, which is illustrated by the free choice of religious belief and practice, we certainly require a great diversity of education to bring out the best development of each type. We require simultaneous experiment on a small scale, instead of vast experiments of Acts which apply to the whole country for a generation at a time. Every Act is only an experiment, and one which is usually spoiled by attempting too much in a compromise, which is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. Had there been in 1870 a hundred schools used for experiment, say five of twenty different types in different parts of the country, the life-history of the pupils would by now have given us a firm basis for rational adjustment of a system. It is fatuous to suppose it possible to make one Procrustean bed to fit children of the country, the mining centre, the manufacturing district, the commercial town, or the fisher folk—of the Yorkshire tyke, the Suffolk dumpling, or the Hampshire hog. Nor is it merely the success of a system in producing examination results that has to be attained. It is quite possible that the best workers in after life may not be the best to cram with temporary bookwork. Nothing short of twenty years of active life can test the value of the education on which it is based.

Should we not at least try the effect of varying amount of control by the central board, the local council, and the teacher himself? May not some latitude in subject be allowed to a teacher, to follow lines which his own mind is best capable of making useful? Should not a great difference be made between the town, where an infant school is needed, to keep children safe while parents are at work, and the country where they can be left to play in the open? Should not country teaching be adapted to making agriculturists? Might it not be possible to leave children entirely in the fields till sixteen, provided that they could pass in reading at nine, and in figures at twelve, however it was learned? A solid two years' half-timing from sixteen to eighteen, when they valued knowledge, might be worth all they gain in the present way. Such are a few of the questions to which answers are necessary, before we can begin to provide for the diversity of education, which is certainly requisite if we are to make it successful—a help instead of a detriment in after life.

And in more detailed education is it not possible to let a child's mind grow on what is of interest to it—to further it on whatever subjects are most attractive and easy to that type of mind, until the habit of learning is so developed that it can be more easily levelled up on the subjects which have been neglected? The mere habit of learning and applying knowledge has to be acquired to begin with, and surely the easier subjects are the best on which to practise the power of concentration of mind. The trainer knows that his monkeys cannot be taught unless they can concentrate attention on the subject in hand. In every direction we need to gain diversity—in types of society, in customs, in varieties of mind; and to gain this basis for useful variation we must begin by cultivating diversity and providing for its success, in place of attacking and crushing it wherever it appears.