Rare stories, page 4
Indeed, this mood of ecstatic yet dispassionate admiration is akin to that "sporting" attitude which, prizing the game more than victory, yet strives in every fibre. It appreciates the universe as though it were art, perhaps tragic art. But let us repeat that it is not tragical in essence. Not only in defeat, but in victory also, we may enjoy the game for its own sake. Alike in victory and in defeat this ecstasy includes a hunger to play a part in the drama of existence with vigour and delicacy, yet it holds spiritually aloof from every cause which it champions. We give ear, so to speak, not merely to the theme of human striving, or life's evolution, but to that celestial music in which our planet's whole story is a passing melody serving an end beyond itself. We are tempted to say that our attention is directed on the form of the universe as a whole. But so bold a claim should be made only with qualification, since, after all, we experience the universe only as fragments, not as an aesthetic unity. Nevertheless it is essential to this mood that in it we do seem in some sense to glimpse a supreme form in which man is contributory, not final.
I would hazard the guess that the work of Mr. T. S. Eliot is inspired by this admiration of an objective world whose form involves both good and evil. Mr. I. A. Richards, I know, argues that such writing is concerned solely to make a "music of ideas"; but in this view he is perhaps prejudiced by his own theory of value and of the nature of art in general. It would seem more true to say that Mr. Eliot calls forth or indicates a music of objective characters. Or perhaps with more strictness we should say that he constructs symbols which are indeed themselves "music of ideas," but in their music they purport to symbolise or epitomise the music of the spheres. This is perhaps the nerve of the matter. In disillusion, we may sometimes discover, or seem to ourselves to discover, an unlooked-for music of facts. And whatever be the true epistemology of value it is very important to inspect clearly the deliverance of such experiences.
There are times in the lives of most men when they wake from the game of private living, and even from the more enthralling intricacy of public service, to see themselves and the whole race of men as dust in a far mightier sport. Some, perhaps, are wholly exempt from such moments; while others, when the blue or grey sky of their world is ripped away like a tent, bury their heads. But some, even while they resent and fear the star's sudden intrusion, are stung into a strange clarity of mind. Even while they see their comforts and defences scattered, and their most admired ends snuffed into irrelevance, even while perhaps they are dissolved in fright, they are thrust into a new and splendid view of things; so that if they were not all the while paralysed with terror they could shout in the zest of amazed admiration. Unlike hares, they crouch before the serpent of eternity not in horror merely, but in ecstasy. After cursing the universe for its seeming mental deficiency, suddenly they recognise that the gods are playing a game very different from man's game, and playing it brilliantly.
Not that they merely swing from pessimism to optimism about their private fortune or their nation's welfare or the future of man; for it must be insisted that this unique enlightenment may occur in the very agony of private defeat or public calamity, even in the terror of death, even in pain, even while they watch the sufferings of their beloveds, or the downfall of their society. Not that their agony is diminished or evaded, but rather that its very intensity wakens them to an aspect hitherto ignored. Not that with the mystics they pierce the veil of sorry phantoms and stand face to face with reality itself in all its reputed benignity. No, they see the very same world that they saw before, but they unexpectedly exult in it. They judge it to be, in some sense which cannot yet be defined, intrinsically excellent or "worthwhile." Having long lived in intimacy with the world, and having ever condemned it for not conforming to their ideal, they suddenly fall in love with it, fall into worship of it, admire in it a severity incomparably more desirable than the sweetness they had demanded of it. And as an actor may enter into the hopes and strivings of his part the more sympathetically just because he appreciates to the full the aesthetic character of the drama, so they now champion the more earnestly the very causes from which they now hold themselves spiritually aloof.
Indeed, so well schooled are they in detachment from all that they take most seriously, that their reaction even to the inhuman excellence of the cosmos is not incompatible with laughter. In mere disillusion we laugh at the hollowness of fallen idols; and our laughter is bitter. But in this other mood, so well have we learned the virtue of laughter, that humour is surprisingly infused throughout our admiration. Without bitterness, and with no need for shame, we can deride the thing we most adore.
Sometimes in this mood man is regarded as a mere irrelevance; but in a shrewder vision we seem to see that man, sensitive dust that he is, has also his part to play, though not the part he thought. For even the dust is in the picture. When the bright vision is past, and we try to think out its significance, it seems indeed that the office of the human mind must be to strive toward ever clearer percipience, and to master and enrich its own imperfect nature always for the end which our fathers called worship; so that we, tiny and ineffectual players in the gods' game, may at least enter intelligently into the spirit of the game, and admire it not merely so far as it favours the ends of man, but for its own character. But we must not claim that man's discerning admiration and participation is necessary to the full achievement of the cosmos; for man's part after all may be finally tragic, and he may never fulfill his supreme office of worship. But in such experiences of dispassionate appreciation as we already know it does seem to be implied that, if man has any cosmical function whatever, it is at least to strive towards ever finer knowledge and will, whether victoriously or toward the doomed failure which is tragedy. For in this mood, though certainly we have no evidence that man will thus flower, we have strange but sure conviction that, whatever the issue, it will be the right issue, in the eyes of the gods.
But what is this talk of "gods"? For good or ill the distinctively modern spirit finds deity both improbable and unattractive. The universe that it admires, even in spite of itself, is conceived as a godless universe. Then how can there be a game, since no one is playing it? Or art, though no one creates it? How can there be any virtue in the unwitting process of things, however vast and subtly systematic? If the excellence of the universe lies neither in its expression of God's idea nor in its conformity with man's own nature, in what sense can it be excellent at all? The claim is that in certain moments of unusually clear percipience, or even through long periods or a whole life-time of vision, a man may discover in the universe, or at least in his schematic view of it, an intrinsic good not commonly revealed, an excellence not in any way dependent on the fulfilment of our purposes, or Life's capacity or even God's will. But surely this claim is meaningless; unless indeed the universe as a whole is itself alive, is an active and self-fulfilling organism. Perhaps it expresses its unconscious nature as a plant does, but with minds for flowers. Perhaps in these moments of vision we do indeed glimpse the form or the spirit of the cosmic tree which bears us. And perhaps the tragedy of our existence is but the tragedy of petals that wither when the fruit sets, not the tragedy of universal frustration. Perhaps the faith of the Romantics was right, though they could not justify it rationally and often interpreted it too simply and optimistically in the light of their romantic preconceptions. Perhaps the truth which they groped for and confused stands revealed at last in Swinburne's "Hertha."
Perhaps this, perhaps that. Only technical philosophy can ever judge the significance of that seeming insight which most of us probably experience at one time or another. But unfortunately the philosophers are still at loggerheads about it all. For it is not clear that there is any meaning whatever in saying that an object can have intrinsic value, or be intrinsically good, apart from any mind's appreciation or purpose. Yet only by such phrases can we do justice to the actual content of this ecstatic mood of appreciation. In this dilemma some incline to sacrifice logic, others to suspect the logic-defying experience. While Professor Whitehead applauds the vision of the Romantics, Mr. Bertrand Russell would probably remind us that our nervous systems are known to play strange tricks, that this judgment of the excellence of the universe may be but a projection of our own confused emotion upon a world which is itself alien to all value; or again that our admiration of an objective system which is careless of man is at heart merely enjoyment of our own supposed emancipation from prejudice, or our own skill of cognition.
The policy of explaining the more mature activities of mind in terms of the more primitive has certainly been fertile in psychology. But whenever it has definitely succeeded, the facts explained have been of the same order as the explanatory facts. In this case, however, the experience to be explained appears to be of a nature different in essence from the primitive impulses which are supposed to explain it. And the more closely it is observed, the more different it seems. For it appears to be in its very essence an interest in objectivity; and all attempts to explain it solely in terms of the enjoyment of subjective activities or of the activities of the individual organism, however complex and "sublimated," seem therefore beside the mark. Those who favour such explanations seem to their opponents unable to focus clearly the experience they would explain. They fail to distinguish in it a quality wholly absent from primitive experience, a disinterested admiration, implying detachment not merely from private desire but from the whole endeavour of humanity. This quality, so foreign to primitive mentality, and so unintelligible in terms of a psychology confined to the primitive, comes to us in the actual experience itself as the just, though scarcely rationable, response to the universe as it is revealed in our time.
There is then at least some reason to suppose that in this unique ecstasy of disinterested admiration something is apprehended which is only to be attained by an "emergent" activity of developed minds. But there remains the epistemological question about the status of value. Do such adjectives as "good" and "bad" apply in strictness only to subjective states, or do they name characters of objects? We cannot here enter into this technical discussion. But we may note that in one theory the essential meaning of the word "good" is the character of fulfilment of capacity or activity, and that this theory is borne out by the experience of disinterested admiration. For in this experience we seem to apprehend the world as fulfilling its own capacity or nature perfectly, though in a manner wholly distinct from the ordinary biological fulfilment. But if we are asked just how the world seems to fulfill itself, we cannot answer intelligibly, and can only plead that the experience is not necessarily deceptive because it cannot yet be rendered intelligible.
But whatever be the truth of these matters, this kind of experiencing, the deliverance of which certainly appears to many modem minds as the supreme good, calls for close attention to-day. For surely it is significant that though the dominant mood of our time is disillusion, our disillusion is strangely flecked with this other, seemingly contradictory, mood of admiration. In times of optimistic faith disinterested admiration is blended with, and indistinguishable from, gratitude toward a divine benefactor; but in times of disillusion it stands out sharply from its background. Thus we may conceive it not as doubtful evidence that "God is on our side," that the universe is after all kindly disposed to us, but as a spontaneous salutation. Our task, then, is to single it out from all that has hitherto confused it, and to recognise that, whatever its true intellectual significance, it is itself an intuition of a value which eclipses all other values. Certainly we must criticise it by bringing to bear on it all the material and instruments of modem knowledge. Certainly we must disentangle it from all the fair myths that have been woven round it. Certainly we must recognise that it offers no comfort, no hope, to our more primitive human longings. But also, in criticising it, we must develop the experience itself. For to-day there are many who, though they reject all the consolations of the churches as either unbelievable or trite, cannot but recognise in this unique act of the spirit the very essence of religion, and in the deliverance of this experience something indestructible and splendid, something in the light of which all other experience should be interpreted.
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The Remaking of Man
On the evening of 2 April 1931, in the afterglow of the triumph of Last and First Men, Stapledon made his first national broadcast. The speech illuminates some episodes in Last and First Men but also recapitulates his old interests in eugenics and biological engineering. On 8 April the speech was the featured text in The Listener, the official publication of the B.B.C., which hailed Stapledon's "prominence as a historian of the future." Paragraph divisions were altered and some colloquialisms were formalized for the print medium; more importantly, the text was also abridged. While limitations of space may have been a factor, censorship - to which Stapledon was no stranger in his career - may also be suspected. The talk was branded as blasphemy by some who tuned in their radios, and the editor at The Listener saved space by excising, among others, precisely those sentences that rejected the immortality of the soul and hypothesized a godless universe. The version in this Reader, taken from the script on deposit at the B.B.C. Archive, is the full text of the broadcast and preserves the texture of Stapledon's speaking voice.
HUMAN NATURE is like our English climate. No one can be sure what it will do at a particular time and place, but we all know that it will be mostly dull or bad, and that it can't be altered.
That, at least, is the common view. Yet both the climate and human nature change. There have been ice- ages. There have been ape-men.
No doubt our own inborn nature is much like that of the earliest true men. But man has only been man for about a million years, and his future may be very much longer. The perfected men and women who are to come will probably regard us as quaint prehistoric monkeys, dignified by a mere spark of humanity. They will perhaps have changed so much that we shall scarcely recognise them as men and women at all. Possibly their bodies will have passed as far beyond the present human form as ours beyond the reptile. Even if they are still erect bipeds, their physiques will have been refashioned through and through by the aeons of natural events that are to come, and probably by artifice also. I should expect that if we could meet a man and woman of that race we should regard them as monstrously ugly. Yet, to one another, they would seem beautiful with a kind of beauty beyond our grasp. For those who had eyes to see, she, that woman of the future, would express in her strange body a far nobler and lovelier womanhood than is found in our world; and he a more virile, a more triumphantly human, manhood.
But let us think of things nearer home. There is one sense in which man is changing very quickly. The man-in-the-street today is mentally a very different being from his counterpart of even two hundred years ago. He may be born much the same, but he has been moulded by a very different world. It is a world which, in spite of all our disastrous muddles and quarrels, is coming more and more under our control. And clearly in so far as we control man's environment, we control human nature itself, at least in a superficial sense.
But further, we have our clever biologists and our bold eugenists. They want to control man's inborn nature, too. Already they have learnt a few surprising tricks, and probably within a century or two they will have learnt many more.
Almost certainly, then, attempts will be made sooner or later to remake man, not only superficially, by changing his circumstances, but radically, by selecting and influencing the germ cells of successive generations.
Now "remaking" man may very easily turn out to be mere monkeying with man. There are two kinds of monkeying. Either you may know what improvements you want, and not know how to produce them; or you may know the technique, without knowing what it is you really want to do. In the case of man, both these dangers are very great.
The problem of technique we must leave to the scientists, bearing in mind, however, the kind of alterations which may be possible, sooner or later. Tonight let us consider whether human nature ought to be changed at all, and if so, in what direction.
Well, I for one am sure that our present human nature needs altering. I can think of many ways in which I myself, for instance, might be better than I am. And my wife would probably welcome even more radical alterations in me.
The general direction of desirable changes I would summarise in this way. They should afford me a richer, wider, deeper, more subtle, more accurate experience of this amazing world. Further, they should help me to see more clearly what is really desirable. Finally, they should enable me, in every kind of situation, to take all relevant facts into account, and behave always with supreme tact, intelligence, insight, foresight, so that always the best possible results may follow. That I should be remade, or you, is impossible. But do we not desire that a race of beings far happier and more vital than ourselves should some day occur? I for one hope that the creation of such a race will become in time the constant policy of all mankind. And though this radical remaking of man is not practical politics to-day, already some of the preliminary steps need no longer be dismissed as fantasy.
There is one obvious way in which either man himself or his world must be improved. Little by little the great diseases, such as cancer, tuberculosis, heart-disease, digestive disorders, nerve and brain disorders, must be abolished. So must all the special troubles of women. And maternity must cease to be a grievous burden. We must create a race gifted with the health and vitality, the beauty and perennial youth, of the mythical heroes.
