Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (10 page)

Estrangement breeds loneliness and despair. the 'encounter with nothingness', cynicism, empty gestures of defiance, as we can see in the greater part of existentialist philosophy and general literature today. Or it suddenly turns - as I have mentioned before - into the ardent adoption of a fanatical teaching which, by a monstrous simplification of reality, pretends to answer all questions. So, what is the cause of estrangement? Never has science been more triumphant; never has man's power over his environment been more complete nor his progress faster. It cannot be a lack of know-how that causes the despair not only of religious thinkers like Kierkegaard but also of leading mathematicians and scientists like Russell and Hoyle. We know how to do many things, but do we know what to do? Ortega y Gasset put it succinctly: 'We cannot live on the human level without ideas. Upon them depends what we do. Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.' What, then, is education? It is the transmission of ideas which enable man to choose between one thing and another, or, to quote Ortega again, 'to live a life which is something above meaningless tragedy or inward disgrace'.

How could for instance a knowledge of the Second Law of Thermodynamics help us in this? Lord Snow tells us that when educated people deplore the 'illiteracy of scientists' he sometimes asks 'How many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics?' The response, he reports, is usually cold and negative. 'Yet,' he says, 'I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: have you read a work of Shakespeare's?' Such a statement challenges the entire basis of our civilisation. What matters is the tool-box of ideas with which, by which, through which, we experience and interpret the world. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is nothing more than a working hypothesis suitable for various types of scientific research. On the other hand - a work by Shakespeare: teeming with the most vital ideas about the inner development of man, showing the whole grandeur and misery of a human existence. How could these two things be equivalent? What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: nothing.' And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another - here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.

Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live. Even the greatest ideas of science are nothing more than working hypotheses. useful for purposes of special research but completely inapplicable to the conduct of our lives or the interpretation of the world. If, therefore, a man seeks education because he feels estranged and bewildered, because his life seems to him empty and meaningless, he cannot get what he is seeking by studying any of the natural sciences, i.e. by acquiring 'know-how'. That study has its own value which I am not inclined to belittle; it tells him a great deal about how things work in nature or in engineering: but it tells him nothing about the meaning of life and can in no way cure his estrangement and secret despair.

Where, then, shall he turn? Maybe, in spite of all that he hears about the scientific revolution and ours being an age of science, he turns to the so-called humanities. Here indeed he can find, if he is lucky, great and vital ideas to NI his mind, ideas with which to think and through which to make the world, society, and his own life intelligible. Let us see what are the main ideas he is likely to find today, I cannot attempt to make a complete list; so I shall confine myself to the enumeration of six leading ideas, all stemming from the nineteenth century, which still dominate, as far as I can see, the minds of 'educated' people today,

1. There is the idea of evolution - that higher forms continually develop out of lower forms, as a kind of natural and automatic process. The last hundred years or so have seen the systematic application of this idea to all aspects of reality without exception.

2. There is the idea of competition, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, which purports to explain the natural and automatic process of evolution and development.

3. There is the idea that all the higher manifestations of human life. such as religion, philosophy, art, etc. - what Marx calls 'the phantasmagorias in the brains of men' - are nothing but 'necessary supplements of the material life process', a super- structure erected to disguise and promote economic interests, the whole of human history being the history of class struggles.

4. In competition, one might think, with the Marxist interpretation of all higher manifestations of human life, there is, fourthly, the Freudian interpretation which reduces them to the dark stirrings of a subconscious mind and explains them mainly as the results of unfulfilled incest-wishes during child- hood and early adolescence.

5. There is the general idea of relativism, denying all absolutes, dissolving all norms and standards, leading to the total undermining of the idea of truth in pragmatism, and affecting even mathematics, which has been defined by Bertrand Russell as 'the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, or whether what we say is true'.

6. Finally there is the triumphant idea of positivism, that valid knowledge can be attained only through the methods of the natural sciences and hence that no knowledge is genuine unless it is based on generally observable facts. Positivism, in other words, is solely interested in 'know-how' and denies the possibility of objective knowledge about meaning and purpose of any kind.

No-one, I think, will be disposed to deny the sweep and power of these six

'large' ideas. They are not the result of any narrow empiricism. No amount of factual inquiry could have verified any one of them. They represent tremendous leaps of the imagination into the unknown and unknowable. Of course, the leap is taken from a small platform of observed fact. These ideas could hot have lodged themselves as firmly in men's minds, as they have done, if they did not contain important elements of truth get their essential character is their claim of universality. Evolution takes everything into its stride, not only material phenomena from nebulae to home sapiens but also all mental phenomena, such as religion or language. Competition, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest are not presented as one set of observations among others, but as universal laws. Marx does not say that some parts of history are made up of class struggles; no, 'scientific materialism', not very scientifically, extends this partial observation to nothing less than the whole of 'the history of all hitherto existing society'.

Freud, again, is not content to report a number of clinical observations but offers a universal theory of human motivation, asserting, for instance, that all religion is nothing but an obsession neurosis. Relativism and positivism, of course, are purely metaphysical doctrines with the peculiar and ironical distinction that they deny the validity of all metaphysics. including themselves.

What do these six 'large' ideas have in common, besides their non-empirical, metaphysical nature? They all assert that what had previously been taken to be something of a higher order is really 'nothing but' a more subtle manifestation of the 'lower' - unless, indeed, the very distinction between higher and lower is denied. Thus man, like the rest of the universe, is really nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms. The difference between a man and a stone is little more than a deceptive appearance. Man's highest cultural achievements are nothing but disguised economic greed or the outflow of sexual frustrations. In any case, it is meaningless to say that man should aim at the 'higher' rather than the 'lower' because no intelligible meaning can be attached to purely subjective notions like 'higher' or 'lower', while the word 'should' is just a sign of authoritarian megalomania.

The ideas of the fathers in the nineteenth century have been visited on the third and fourth generations living in the second half of the twentieth century. To their originators, these ideas were simply the result of their intellectual processes. In the third and fourth generations, they have become the very tools and instruments through which the world is being experienced and interpreted. Those that bring forth new ideas are seldom ruled by them.

But their ideas obtain power over men's lives in the third and fourth generations when they have become a part of that great mass of ideas, including language, which seeps into a person's mind during his 'Dark Ages'.

These nineteenth-century ideas are firmly lodged in the minds of practically everybody in the western world today, whether educated or uneducated. In the uneducated mind they are still rather muddled and nebulous, too weak to make the world intelligible. Hence the longing for education, that is to say, for something that will lead us out of the dark wood of our muddled ignorance into the light of understanding.

I have said that a purely scientific education cannot do this for us because it deals only with ideas of know-how, whereas we need to understand why things are as they are and what we are to do with our lives. What we learn by studying a particular science is in any case too specific and specialised for our wider purposes. So we turn to the humanities to obtain a clear view of the large and vital ideas of our age. Even in the humanities we may get bogged down in a mass of specialised scholarship furnishing our minds with lots of small ideas just as unsuitable as the ideas which we might pick up from the natural sciences. But we may also be more fortunate (if fortunate it is) and find a teacher who will 'clear our minds', clarify the ideas - the 'large'

and universal ideas already existent in our minds - and thus make the world intelligible for us.

Such a process would indeed deserve to be called 'education'; And what do we get from it today? A view of the world as a wasteland in which there is no meaning or purpose, in which man's consciousness is an unfortunate cosmic accident, in which anguish and despair are the only final realities. If by means of a real education man manages to climb to what Ortega calls 'the Height of Our Times' or 'the Height of the Ideas of our Times', he finds himself in an abyss of nothingness. He may feel like echoing Byron: Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most

Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,

The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.

In other words, even a humanistic education lifting us to the height of the ideas of our time cannot 'deliver the goods', because what men are quite legitimately looking for is life more abundant, and not sorrow.

What has happened? How is such a thing possible?

The leading ideas of the nineteenth century, which claimed to do away with metaphysics, are themselves a bad, vicious, life- destroying type of metaphysics. We are suffering from them as from a fatal disease. It is not true that knowledge is sorrow. But poisonous errors bring unlimited sorrow in the third and fourth generation. The errors are not in science but in the philosophy put forward in the name of science. As Etienne Gilson put it more than twenty years ago:

'Such a development was by no means inevitable, but the progressive growth of natural science had made it more and more probable. The growing interest taken by men in the practical results of science was in itself both natural and legitimate, but it helped them to forget that science is knowledge, and practical results but its by-products .... Before their unexpected success in finding conclusive explanations of the material world, men had begun either to despise all disciplines in which such demonstrations could not be found, or to rebuild those disciplines after the pattern of the physical sciences. As a consequence, metaphysics and ethics had to be either ignored or, at least, replaced by new positive sciences; in either case, they would be eliminated. A very dangerous move indeed, which accounts for the perilous position in which western culture has now found itself.'

It is not even true the metaphysics and ethics would be eliminated. On the contrary, all we got was bad metaphysic sand appalling ethics.

Historians know that metaphysical errors can lead to death. R. G.

Collingwood wrote:

The Patristic diagnosis of the decay of Greco-Roman civilisation ascribes that event to a metaphysical disease .... It was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world .... The cause was a metaphysical cause.

The "pagan" world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions, they (the patriotic writers) said, because owing to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were .... If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this would not have mattered.'

This passage can be applied. without change, to present-day civilisation.

We have become confused as to what our convictions really are. The great ideas of the nineteenth century may fill our minds in one way or another, but our hearts do not believe in them all the same. Mind and heart are at war with one another, nor as is commonly asserted, reason and faith. Our reason has become beclouded by an extraordinary, blind and unreasonable faith in a set of fantastic and life-destroying ideas inherited from the nineteenth century. It is the foremost task of our reason to recover a truer faith than that, Education cannot help us as long as it accords no place to meta- physics.

Whether the subjects taught are subjects of science or of the humanities, if the teaching does not lead to a clarification of metaphysics. that is to say, of our fundamental convictions, it cannot educate a man and, consequently, cannot be of real value to society.

It is often asserted that education is breaking down because of over-specialisation. But this is only a partial and misleading diagnosis.

Specialisation is not in itself a faulty principle of education. What would be the alternative - an amateurish smattering of all major subjects? Or a lengthy
studium generale
in which men are forced to spend their time sniffing at subjects which they do not wish to pursue, while they are being kept away from what they want to learn? This cannot be the right answer, since it can only lead to the type of intellectual man, whom Cardinal Newman castigated