Present Concerns Read online

  (6) Scepticism about Reason. Practicality, combined with vague notions of what Freud, or Einstein, said, has produced a general, and quite unalarmed, belief that reasoning proves nothing and that all thought is conditioned by irrational processes. More than once in argument with an intelligent man (not a member of the Intelligentsia) I have pointed out that the position he took up would logically involve a denial of the validity of thought, and he has understood, and agreed with me, but has not regarded this as any objection to his original position. He accepts without dismay the conclusion that all our thoughts are invalid.

  Such, in my opinion, are the main characteristics of the mental climate in which a modern evangelist has to work. One way of summarising it would be to say that I sometimes wonder whether we shall not have to re-convert men to real Paganism as a preliminary to converting them to Christianity. If they were Stoics, Orphics, Mithraists, or (better still) peasants worshipping the Earth, our task might be easier. That is why I do not regard contemporary Paganisms (Theosophy, Anthroposophy, etc.) as a wholly bad symptom.

  There are, of course, also good elements in the present situation. There is, perhaps, more social conscience than there has ever been before: and though chastity in conduct is probably low I think modern young people are perhaps less prurient and less obsessed with lascivious thought than more modest and decorous ages have been. (This is only an impression, and may be mistaken.) I also think that the very fact of our isolation, the fact that we are coming to be almost the only people who appeal to the buried (but not dead) human appetite for the objective truth, may be a source of strength as well as of difficulty. Before closing, I must add that the limitation of my own gifts has compelled me always to use a predominantly intellectual approach. But I have also been present when an appeal of a much more emotional and also more ‘pneumatic’, kind has worked wonders on a modern audience. Where God gives the gift, the ‘foolishness of preaching’1 is still mighty. But best of all is a team of two: one to deliver the preliminary intellectual barrage, and the other to follow up with a direct attack on the heart.

  XIII

  TALKING ABOUT BICYCLES

  ‘Talking about bicycles,’ said my friend, ‘I have been through the four ages. I can remember a time in early childhood when a bicycle meant nothing to me: it was just part of the huge, meaningless background of grown-up gadgets against which life went on. Then came a time when to have a bicycle, and to have learned to ride it, and to be at last spinning along on one’s own, early in the morning, under trees, in and out of the shadows, was like entering Paradise. That apparently effortless and frictionless gliding—more like swimming than any other motion, but really most like the discovery of a fifth element—that seemed to have solved the secret of life. Now one would begin to be happy. But, of course, I soon reached the third period. Pedalling to and fro from school (it was one of those journeys that feel up-hill both ways) in all weathers, soon revealed the prose of cycling. The bicycle, itself, became to me what his oar is to a galley slave.’

  ‘But what was the fourth age?’ I asked.

  ‘I am in it now, or rather I am frequently in it. I have had to go back to cycling lately now that there’s no car. And the jobs I use it for are often dull enough. But again and again the mere fact of riding brings back a delicious whiff of memory. I recover the feelings of the second age. What’s more, I see how true they were—how philosophical, even. For it really is a remarkably pleasant motion. To be sure, it is not a recipe for happiness as I then thought. In that sense the second age was a mirage. But a mirage of something.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ said I.

  ‘I mean this. Whether there is, or whether there is not, in this world or in any other, the kind of happiness which one’s first experiences of cycling seemed to promise, still, on any view, it is something to have had the idea of it. The value of the thing promised remains even if that particular promise was false—even if all possible promises of it are false.’

  ‘Sounds like a carrot in front of a donkey’s nose,’ said I.

  ‘Even that wouldn’t be quite a cheat if the donkey enjoyed the smell of carrots as much as, or more than, the taste. Or suppose the smell raised in the donkey emotions which no actual eating could ever satisfy? Wouldn’t he look back (when he was an old donkey, living in the fourth age) and say, “I’m glad I had that carrot tied in front of my nose. Otherwise I might still have thought eating was the greatest happiness. Now I know there’s something far better—the something that came to me in the smell of the carrot. And I’d rather have known that—even if I’m never to get it—than not to have known it, for even to have wanted it is what makes life worth having.”’

  ‘I don’t think a donkey would feel like that at all.’

  ‘No. Neither a four-legged donkey nor a two-legged one. But I have a suspicion that to feel that way is the real mark of a human.’

  ‘So that no one was human till bicycles were invented?’

  ‘The bicycle is only one instance. I think there are these four ages about nearly everything. Let’s give them names. They are the Unenchanted Age, the Enchanted Age, the Disenchanted Age, and the Re-enchanted Age. As a little child I was Unenchanted about bicycles. Then, when I first learned to ride, I was Enchanted. By sixteen I was Disenchanted and now I am Re-enchanted.’

  ‘Go on,’ said I. ‘What are some of the other applications?’

  ‘I suppose the most obvious is love. We all remember the Unenchanted Age—there was a time when women meant nothing to us. Then we fell in love; that, of course, was the Enchantment. Then, in the early or middle years of marriage there came—well, Disenchantment. All the promises had turned out, in a way, false. No woman could be expected—the thing was impossible—I don’t mean any disrespect either to my own wife or to yours. But—’

  ‘I was never married,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Oh! That’s a pity. For in that case you can’t possibly understand this particular form of Re-enchantment. I don’t think I could explain to a bachelor how there comes a time when you look back on that first mirage, perfectly well aware that it was a mirage, and yet, seeing all the things that have come out of it, things the boy and girl could never have dreamed of, and feeling also that to remember it is, in a sense, to bring it back in reality, so that under all the other experiences it is still there like a shell lying at the bottom of a clear, deep pool—and that nothing would have happened at all without it—so that even where it was least true it was telling you important truths in the only form you would then understand—but I see I’m boring you.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said I.

  ‘Let’s take an example that may interest you more. How about war? Most of our juniors were brought up Unenchanted about war. The Unenchanted man sees (quite correctly) the waste and cruelty and sees nothing else. The Enchanted man is in the Rupert Brooke or Philip Sidney state of mind—he’s thinking of glory and battle-poetry and forlorn hopes and last stands and chivalry. Then comes the Disenchanted Age—say Siegfried Sassoon. But there is also a fourth stage, though very few people in modern England dare to talk about it. You know quite well what I mean. One is not in the least deceived: we remember the trenches too well. We know how much of the reality the romantic view left out. But we also know that heroism is a real thing, that all the plumes and flags and trumpets of the tradition were not there for nothing. They were an attempt to honour what is truly honourable: what was first perceived to be honourable precisely because everyone knew how horrible war is. And that’s where this business of the Fourth Age is so important.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Isn’t it immensely important to distinguish Unenchantment from Disenchantment—and Enchantment from Re-enchantment? In the poets, for instance. The war poetry of Homer or The Battle of Maldon, for example, is Re-enchantment. You see in every line that the poet knows, quite as well as any modern, the horrible thing he is writing about. He celebrates heroism but he has paid the proper price for doing so. He sees th
e horror and yet sees also the glory. In the Lays of Ancient Rome, on the other hand, or in Lepanto (jolly as Lepanto is) one is still enchanted: the poets obviously have no idea what a battle is like.1 Similarly with Unenchantment and Disenchantment. You read an author in whom love is treated as lust and all war as murder—and so forth. But are you reading a Disenchanted man or only an Unenchanted man? Has the writer been through the Enchantment and come out on to the bleak highlands, or is he simply a subman who is free from the love mirage as a dog is free, and free from the heroic mirage as a coward is free? If Disenchanted, he may have something worth hearing to say, though less than a Re-enchanted man. If Unenchanted, into the fire with his book. He is talking of what he doesn’t understand. But the great danger we have to guard against in this age is the Unenchanted man, mistaking himself for, and mistaken by others for, the Disenchanted man. What were you going to say?’

  ‘I was just wondering whether the Enchantment which you claim to look back on from the final stage was often no more than an illusion of memory. Doesn’t one remember a good many more exciting experiences than one has really had?’

  ‘Why yes. In a sense. Memory itself is the supreme example of the four ages. Wordsworth, you see, was Enchanted. He got delicious gleams of memory from his early youth and took them at their face value. He believed that if he could have got back to certain spots in his own past he would find there the moment of joy waiting for him. You are Disenchanted. You’ve begun to suspect that those moments, of which the memory is now so ravishing, weren’t at the time quite so wonderful as they now seem. You’re right. They weren’t. Each great experience is

  a whisper

  Which Memory will warehouse as a shout.2

  But what then? Isn’t the warehousing just as much a fact as anything else? Is the vision any less important because a particular kind of polarised light between past and present happens to be the mechanism that brings it into focus? Isn’t it a fact about mountains—as good a fact as any other—that they look purple at a certain distance?—If you won’t have any more beer perhaps we’d better be getting along. That man on the other side of the bar thinks we’ve been talking politics.’

  ‘I’m not sure that we haven’t,’ said I.

  ‘You’re quite right. You mean that Aristocracy is one other example? It was the merest Enchantment to suppose that any human beings, trusted with uncontrolled powers over their fellows, would not use it for exploitation; or even to suppose that their own standards of honour, valour, and elegance (for which alone they existed) would not soon degenerate into flash-vulgarity. Hence, rightly and inevitably, the Disenchantment, the age of Revolutions. But the question on which all hangs is whether we can go on to Re-enchantment.’

  ‘What would that Re-enchantment be?’

  ‘The realisation that the thing of which Aristocracy was a mirage is a vital necessity; if you like, that Aristocracy was right: it was only the Aristocrats who were wrong. Or, putting it the other way, that a society which becomes democratic in ethos as well as in constitution is doomed. And not much loss either.’

  XIV

  ON LIVING IN AN ATOMIC AGE

  In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’

  In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

  This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

  ‘But,’ you reply, ‘it is not death—not even painful and premature death—that we are bothering about. Of course the chance of that is not new. What is new is that the atomic bomb may finally and totally destroy civilisation itself. The lights may be put out for ever.’

  This brings us much nearer to the real point; but let me try to make clear exactly what I think that point is. What were your views about the ultimate future of civilisation before the atomic bomb appeared on the scene? What did you think all this effort of humanity was to come to in the end? The real answer is known to almost everyone who has even a smattering of science; yet, oddly enough, it is hardly ever mentioned. And the real answer (almost beyond doubt) is that, with or without atomic bombs, the whole story is going to end in NOTHING. The astronomers hold out no hope that this planet is going to be permanently inhabitable. The physicists hold out no hope that organic life is going to be a permanent possibility in any part of the material universe. Not only this earth, but the whole show, all the suns of space, are to run down. Nature is a sinking ship. Bergson talks about the élan vital, and Mr Shaw talks about the ‘Life-force’ as if they could surge on for ever and ever. But that comes of concentrating on biology and ignoring the other sciences. There is really no such hope. Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If Nature is all that exists—in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature—then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt atomic bombs may cut its duration on this present planet shorter that it might have been; but the whole thing, even if it lasted for billions of years, must be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which precede and follow it that I cannot feel excited about its curtailment.

  What the wars and the weather (are we in for another of those periodic ice ages?) and the atomic bomb have really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before 1914, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities.

  We see at once (when we have been waked) that the important question is not whether an atomic bomb is going to obliterate ‘civilisation’. The important question is whether ‘Nature’—the thing studied by the sciences—is the only thing in existence. Because if you answer yes to the second question, then the first question only amounts to asking whether the inevitable frustration of all human activities may be hurried on by our own action instead of coming at its natural time. That is, of course, a question that concerns us very much. Even on a ship which will certainly sink sooner or later, the news that the boiler might blow up now would not be heard with indifference by anyone. But those who knew that the ship was sinking in any case would not, I think, be quite so desperately excited as those who had forgotten this fact, and were vaguely imagining that it might arrive somewhere.

  It is, then, on the second question that we really need to make up our minds. And let us begin by supposing that Nature is all that exists. Let us suppose that nothing ever has existed or ever will exist
except this meaningless play of atoms in space and time: that by a series of hundredth chances it has (regrettably) produced things like ourselves—conscious beings who now know that their own consciousness is an accidental result of the whole meaningless process and is therefore itself meaningless, though to us (alas!) it feels significant.

  In this situation there are, I think, three things one might do:

  (1) You might commit suicide. Nature which has (blindly, accidentally) given me for my torment this consciousness which demands meaning and value in a universe that offers neither, has luckily also given me the means of getting rid of it. I return the unwelcome gift. I will be fooled no longer.

  (2) You might decide simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab—only the coarsest sensual pleasures. You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a ‘good time’; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.