III
The answer to the second question is much easier. The human race has continued to progress in its culture, in its knowledge, in its power over nature, because it has devised institutions which have created for it a continuous social memory that defies death. Now, as ever, the wisest and the best must die, while their place is taken by babies born as ignorant and void of knowledge as in the beginning. Only there has been invented apparatus which relieves the civilized baby of his hereditary ignorance, and renders him potentially the heir to all the wisdom of the ages.
In the first place,Languagenot only extends enormously the possibilities ofco-operation and common action, but also renders possible the consolidation of customs and their preservation by oral tradition. In the next place,Writingenables a society to record all that it considers worth remembering. Upon these two inventions may be reared vast intricate structures, religious, political, social, and scientific, which knit together and dominate human societies from generation to generation, and create the conditions for an almost mechanical accumulation of knowledge.
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 thatthey 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 theperversity 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 wishesfor 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, andseats 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 theirown 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 thatnot 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 historicalstudies, a backward-looking bias in itsalumni. 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.