The Aristos

1 At present almost all our education is directed to two ends: to get wealth for the state and to gain a livelihood for the individual. It is therefore little wonder that society is money-obsessed, since the whole tenor of education seems to indicate that this obsession is both normal and desirable.

2 In spite of the fact that we now have almost universal education, we are qualitatively one of the least-educated ages, precisely because education has everywhere surrendered to economic need. Relatively far better educations were received by the fortunate few in the eighteenth century; in the Renaissance; in ancient Rome and Greece. The aims of education in all those periods were far superior to our own* they opened the student admirably to the understanding and enjoyment of life and to his responsibilities tot wards society. Of course the facts and subjects of the old classical education are largely unnecessary to us today; and of course it was the product of a highly unjust economic situation, but at its best it arrived at something none of our present systems remotely approach: the rounded human being.

3 There should be four main aims in a good education. The first is the one that pre-empts all present systems: the training of the pupil for an economic role in society. The second is teaching the nature of society and the human polity. The third is teaching the richness of existence. And the fourth is the establishment of that sense of relative recompense which man, in contrast to the other orders of animate life, has so long lost. In simpler terms, we need to fit the students for a livelihood, then for living among other human beings, then for enjoying his own life, and finally for comprehending the purpose (and ultimately, the justice) of existence in human form.

4 Now there are two important distinctions between the first and the latter three of these aims. From the point of view of the state they are to a certain extent hostile. The economy does not want too much attention paid by its workers to social purpose, self-enjoyment and the ultimate nature of existence; it needs intelligent and obedient cogs, not intelligent and independent individuals. And since the state always has a very large say in the nature of the educational system, we can expect little desire for change from politicians and administrators.

5 The second distinction is this: whereas the first economic-role type of education will plainly vary with the economic needs of the nation, and so legitimately vary from country to country, the latter three purposes hardly vary at all, since we are all in the same human situation and endowed with the same senses. In these three fields virtually the same education could be taught all over the world; and should be taught. But this again represents a threat to the identity of the state; and is a second reason why its Servants’ can be expected to oppose any introduction of a universally similar syllabus.

6 Now it may be argued that the best of our universities, at least in the richer and culturally more advanced countries, already provide such an education. Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, the great new Californian universities, the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale, and similar prestigious centres of learning certainly provide a richness of culture where a student can achieve those further three aims if he has the inclination and can find the time. But even here the overriding factor is the examination system. It is only in very recent times that the chief function of a university (or school of any kind) has been taken to be the grading of its students by examination. We know why this is so: to ensure that the most deserving students get the places available. But this immediately reveals the examination system for what it is: a desperate expedient, exactly analogous to rationing food in wartime, in a desperate situation.

7 All the evils of history are attributable to a shortage of schools. And the shortage of schools in our own time is the most desperate in the history of man. The more equality we want, the more education we want; the more means of communication, the more we see the want; the more leisure we gain, the more we need to be taught to use it; and the more populations grow, the more schools they will demand.

8 Each age has a special risk. Ours is letting half the world starve literally and nine-tenths of it starve educationally. No species can afford to be ignorant. The only world in which it could allow itself such a luxury is one in which it had no enemies and had risen above hazard and evolution.

A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

9 Before we can approach the concept of a universal education, we have to consider that of a universal language. Teaching is above all communication, and communication is impossible unless there is a generally understood medium. We therefore need a language that may be taught as a universal second tongue.

10 It is absolutely clear that the attempts to create such a language artificially (Esperanto, Ido and the rest) have failed. Their inventors’ perhaps worthy desire to satisfy national pride by running together disparate elements from different languages leads them all into an absurd impracticability, since one thus destroys any hope of providing teachers who speak the language naturally; there is no existing and tried model to refer to for new developments and resources; and perhaps worst of all, these pseudo-languages can offer no literature.

11 There are four requisites of a universal language:

1. It should be based on an already existing major language.

2. It should be analytic, not synthetic. (Synthetic languages are those that incorporate signs as to meaning and syntactical function inside each word – that is, they have genders, case systems, a widely variable word order; analytic languages have fewer such features and depend far more on a rigorous word order.)

3. It should have a phonetic spelling system based on a limited number of symbols.

4. It should be able to provide an effective simple or basic mode of communication and a fertile and adaptable more complex one.

12 We may at once rule out the numerically most spoken language: Chinese. Its reading symbols are hopelessly unlimited; its pronunciation is tonal (meaning may depend on musical pitch); it is highly dialectal; and it is semantically, as every translator of Chinese poetry knows, bewilderingly imprecise.

13 With one exception all the principal European languages, whether Romance, Teutonic or Slavonic in origin, retain too many synthetic features in syntax and declension. The same is true of Arabic. However interesting and evocative gender-systems and complex verb and noun forms may be in a literary sense, philologically they are redundant. No one designing a new language with ease of learning and functional utility in mind would for a moment retain them.

14 This leads to the inescapable conclusion that the most suitable candidate is English. It is already the de facto second language of the world; and every teacher of languages knows that this is because it is the least synthetic of the major tongues and therefore the easiest to learn. If we British and Americans suppose that it has gained its ubiquity simply because of our past and present political power we are much mistaken. Foreigners increasingly speak English because it is the best tool available; not because they love or admire us.

15 Its advantages are considerable. It is numerically the second most spoken (as a mother-tongue) language of the world, and the most widely spoken by non-native speakers. Its dialects, unlike those of Chinese, are largely intercomprehensible. It has a rich literature, both historical and contemporary; and it has rich resources and a facility for new development. Its alphabet is simple. And it is very well suited to both simple and complex modes of expression.

16 It has, of course, disadvantages. Its spelling is (compared to a language like Italian) very far from phonetic. It does retain some synthetic features, including some annoying irregularities in declension. In some of its spoken forms (such as British English) it becomes almost a tonal language, full of subtle nuances of meaning dependent on minute (for a foreigner) changes of stress. Its richness of vocabulary – two or three times more words than most other European languages – also creates problems of usage.

17 But the adaptations required are not too forbidding or if they are so, only to those of us for whom English is the mother-tongue. The most urgent need is for a phonetic spelling system (which would of course do something far more important than facilitate spelling: is would aid pronunciation). No one has ever fully answered Bernard Shaw’s arguments for this step. The rationalization of the present alphabet is a small price to pay for the vastly increased utility it would give to the language.

18 The second field for improvement lies in the regularization of exceptions in declension and syntax. This is a far more difficult problem, especially as so many of the exceptions he among very common words. One has only to regularize a sentence like ‘I saw the men working hard’ into ‘I seed the mans working hardly’ to realize the pitfalls. Nonetheless there are many declensional sore thumbs that could be remedied without fear of ambiguity.

19 Language is a tool, the most important that man has. We ‘should allow nothing – neither the prejudice of the linguistic chauvinists nor our (if we are English) distaste for barbaric-sounding innovations in our language – to stand in the way of a unilingual world. This is in a sense an English-speakers’ responsibility. We should perfect the tool for the special function. All the evidence is that the rest of the world will happily learn to use it.

THE THREE FURTHER AIMS OF EDUCATION

20 Education is the most vital of all social activities and therefore the most eagerly abused by the contemporary power-system – whether that system is religious, as in the Middle Ages, or political-economic, as for the last century or so. It has in fact been tyrannized since the rise of the great religions in the first millennium. In many ways the educational theories of the ancients are more modern – less corrupted by political and economic need – than any that have been evolved since, and the three further aims of education I propose are not mine. They were laid down in the third century after Christ by the great Neo-Platonist philosopher, Plotinus. He required an outward education – civil and social; an inward one – personal and self-revealing; and finally a synoptic education that would allow the student to grasp, or at least glimpse, the complex whole of human existence. This is not the place to develop in any detail the scheme of such a triple education in humanity; but some general needs and problems must be dealt with. The first and most practical difficulty in establishing a world-wide syllabus in humanity is only too clearly nationalism.

NATIONALISM

21 Nationalism is a cheap instinct and a dangerous tool. Take away from any country what it owes to other countries; and then be proud of it if you can.

22 In a poor country, patriotism is to believe that one’s country would be the best if it were rich and powerful. In a rich one, patriotism is to believe that one’s country is the best because it is rich and powerful. So patriotism becomes the desire to get what others have or to keep others from getting what one has. In short, it is an aspect of conservatism; of animal envy and animal selfishness.

23 The significant truth is not that you are lucky to have been born into one of the best – the richest or most powerful – countries; but that others are unlucky not to have been born into it. You are not a starving Indian peasant, but you might have been. That you are not is not a matter for self-congratulation, but one for charitable action, for concern. The proper domain for nationalism is art and culture; not politics.

24 Men were one in a tribe, one in a city, were one in a church, in a political party. But now they are becoming a world of isolated ones. The old bonds dissolve; the bonds of the race, of the shared language, of the shared rites, of the shared history. This is good. We disintegrate now to integrate in the only good unity: a one humanity.

25 An education in humanity must inculcate a oneness of situation in each mind in each land: a common predicament and a common existence, a common right to recompense, and a common justification and justice. It must therefore teach children to see the faults in society; by teaching them for nationalistic reasons to pretend that bad things are good, we teach them to teach the same. A bad lesson has a long life.

26 What the state or the system considers a good teacher and what is a good teacher are always two different things. A good teacher never teaches only his subject.

27 It has never been more important that we should have such teachers; and this is because we now know that in another fifty years’ time the great bulk of our teaching will be done by machines. To those who can conceive of education only as the learning of facts and techniques that will be useful to the economic system, this prospect is excellent. No human teacher will be able to equal a well-programmed computer-teacher in his command of the science of his subject, or in his efficiency as an imparter of information.

28 I referred to this mechanistic heresy in the discussion of Christianity. But the best method is the most effective one for the situation, not the most efficient in theory. The menace facing us in the near future is that we shall be ourselves mechanized into believing that the good teacher is the most efficient in terms of the facts of his subject. If we believe this, then we shall fall under the tyranny of our computers – in short, under the worst, because universal, form of nationalism in the history of man.

29 But not all is black in this prospect. There are many fields in which we can welcome the computer-teacher; and that will free the human teachers for the teaching of the subjects (perhaps it would be better to say method of teaching) where they cannot be supplanted. And one of the prime purposes of the triple education in humanity I am advocating will be to counteract, or place in perspective, the triumph of the computer in its appropriate fields.

ART AND SCIENCE

30 This specific problem of the computer-teacher leads to the next great problem: that of the proper roles of science and art in human life.

31 Everyone should have a sound grounding in all the fundamental sciences, and all should know the great linchpin, the axis of reason, that is, scientific method. But large areas of science are remote from the ordinary business of living, and I would define the areas most relevant to education in humanity as those that destroy prejudice, superstition and the kind of ignorance that is clearly harmful to society. In March, 1963, hundreds of Balinese were killed in a volcanic eruption because they would not leave their homes. They believed that the gods would punish anyone who ran away. Our world spends millions on exploring planets we already know to be uninhabitable and yet lets such lethal stupidity still brew on Earth.

32 Science has two principal effects on its practitioners. One, totally beneficial, is heuristic – that is, it trains the scientist to think and discover for himself. Plainly we need as much education in this aspect of science as we can get. But another characteristic of science is double-edged, and this is its tendency to analyse, to break down the whole into components. Now plainly analysis is a very vital part of the heuristic process; but its side-effects, as in some medicines, may be extremely pernicious.

33 The purely analytic scientist becomes so accustomed to seeing matter as a demonstration of certain verifiable or falsifiable principles that he fives at one remove from it. Between him and the real world springs the law, the explanation, the necessity to categorize. Everything Midas touched turned to gold, everything this kind of scientist touches turns to its function m his analysis.

34 There is another allied danger. The complexity of the modern sciences is such that specialization is essential; not only in the interests of scientific or industrial efficiency, but in the nature of the mind’s capacity. The scholar in many fields is extinct; not because the desire to be such a scholar is extinct, but because the fields are too many, and too complex.

35 Pure science and impure economics both require of the scientist that he should live most of his thinking life along some spoke remote from the true hub of society of which he is a member; and from the true hub of the now in which he is. This produces the characteristic and expectable two-facedness of the modern scientist: scientific morality and social immorality. Scientists have an inherent tendency to become slaves of the state.

36 The scientific mind, in being totally scientific, is being unscientific. We are in a phase of history where the scientific pole is dominant; but where there is pole, there is counterpole. The scientist atomizes, someone must synthesize; the scientist withdraws, someone must draw together. The scientist particularizes, someone must universalize. The scientist dehumanizes, someone must humanize. The scientist turns his back on the as yet, and perhaps eternally, unverifiable; and someone must face it.

37 Art, even the simplest, is the expression of truths too complex for science to express, or to conveniently express. This is not to say that science is in some way inferior to art, but that they have different purposes and different uses. Art is a human shorthand of knowledge, a crucible, an algebra, a tremendous condensing in the case of great art of galaxies of thoughts, facts, memories, emotions, events, experiences, to ten lines in Macbeth, to six bars in Bach, to a square foot of canvas in a Rembrandt.

38 Certain scientific laws may seem analogous to great art; they condense countless trillions of phenomena into one statement. But this statement is an abstraction, not a concentration, of reality.

39 All arts tend to become sciences, or crafts; but the essential mystery in art is that the artist constantly surpasses whatever the science or the craft of the art might have foretold; and constantly surpasses the scientific description and evaluation of what is art and what is good or bad art.

40 Art is always a complex beyond science. It computes all the computers. One might feed the tastes of a thousand musical people into a computer, which could then compose ‘their’ music; but it would deny the great principle – an artefact is pre-eminently whatever only one man could have made. It is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.*

41 Science is what a machine can or might do; art is what it will never do. This is a definition of what art should and must be to mankind; not a denial of the already proven fact that science can perfectly well manufacture what can pass as art.

42 A good scientist cuts the umbilical cord between his private personality, his emotions, his self, and his creation; his discovery of a new law, or phenomenon, or property. But a good artefact is always a limb, a branch, a second self. Science disembodies; art embodies.

43 It is tempting to treat artefacts as phenomena that can be best apprehended when scientifically analysed and classified; thence the sciences of art history and of criticism. From this springs the illusion that all art is contained within the science that can describe, appraise and categorize it; thence, the ridiculous belief that art is finally ‘inferior’ to science, as if nature is inferior to natural history.

44 This scientization of art, so characteristic of our age, is absurd. Science has shaken off the fetters of art, and now fetters art. Above all it scientizes the inmost characteristic of art – mystery. For what good science tries to eliminate, good art seeks to provoke – mystery, which is lethal to the one, and vital to the other.

45 Of course I do not wish to deny the utility of a scientific criticism, a natural history, of art. But I should like to see destroyed the notion that art is a pseudo-science; that it is sufficient to know art; that art is knowable in the sense that an electronic circuit or a rabbit’s foetus is knowable.

46 Different tools and languages; different superficial notions of what is vital in existence, therefore different superficial aims; different minds; yet all great scientists are in a sense artists and all great artists are in a sense scientists, since they have the same human aim: to approach a reality, to convey a reality, to symbolize a reality, to summarize a reality, to convince of a reality. All serious scientists and artists want the same: a truth that no one will need to change.

47 All symbolization, and all science and all art is symbolization, is an attempt to escape from time. All symbols summarize; evoke what is absent; serve as tools; permit us to control our movements in the river of time, and are thus attempts to control time.

But science tries to be true of an event for all time; while art tries to be an event for all time.

48 Neither the scientifically nor the artistically expressed reality is the most real reality. The ‘real’ reality is a meaningless particularity, a total incoherence, a ubiquitous isolation, a universal disconnection. It is a sheet of blank paper; we do not call the drawings or equations we make on the paper the paper. Our interpretations of reality are not ‘the’ reality, any more than the blankness of the paper is the drawing. Our drawings, our equations, are ultimately pseudo-realities, but those are the only realities that concern us because they are the only realities that can concern us.

49 The practice of an art, or arts, is as essential to the whole man as a knowledge of science. This is not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

50 All artefacts please and teach the artist first, and other people later. The pleasing and teaching come from the explanation of self by the expression of self; by seeing the self, and all the selves of the whole self, in the mirror of what the self has created.

51 In any good education science and art must hold equal rank. They do not hold equal rank today because the majority of scientists are not true scientists, that is heuristic pursuers of knowledge, but technologists, or analytical appliers of it. The technological view of life is one that of its nature imposes a highly mechanical and empirical approach within its own field; the danger now is that this approach is made to all other fields as well. And to the human turned technologist art must seem a highly dismissible activity because neither it nor its effects can be assessed by any easily verifiable method.

52 The true scientist never dismisses, depreciates, or condescends to art; I consider this an almost fundamental definition of him. And conversely, of the true artist.

53 Already, in America especially, we see the attempt to turn art into a kind of pseudo-technology. In the hideously misnamed ‘creative writing’ courses the notion is spread that it is sufficient to learn the technique to achieve the value, and there are now increasing hosts of writers and painters characterized by a very distinctive pseudo-technological hollowness.

54 Their artefacts are cleverly assembled and fashionably neat, neatly fashionable, and yet the whole is never more than the sum of the parts. When the technique is praised, everything is praised. There is a spotless eggshell, but no meat.

55 Of course most good and all great artists show skill at techniques. But the pseudo-technological artist is like an angler who thinks the essential is to be able to handle a rod and bait a hook; but the true essential is to know a river to fish in. The thing comes first, then its expression; and today we are faced with an army of cleverly-trained expressers all in pursuit of something to express; a crowd of expert anglers futilely casting in the middle of a ploughed field.

56 A counter argument is this: granted that the ability to express is not the same as the expression of something valuable, a person trained to express is still better equipped to perceive the valuably expressible than an untrained one. I believe the contrary: that the teaching of command of special techniques limits vision rather than extends it. If you train someone to be an angler using special techniques, he will see the world in terms of angling by those special techniques.

57 A young would-be artist trained to ‘create’ in the style of this or that successful modern artist will begin to gain that artist’s sensibility as well as his techniques; and this always present but never so probable prospect of being endlessly imitated, of endlessly imposing his sensibilities and views of life on impressible young ‘trained’ minds, must seem one of the most disagreeable facing the genuinely serious and gifted artist.

58 Being an artist is first discovering the self and then stating the self in self-chosen terms. The proper school of any art should have two courses: a museum course and a craft course. The museum course simply teaches the history of the art and the monuments (all past masters) of the art; the craft course teaches the basic practical essentials, the syntax, grammar, prosody, paint mixing, academic draughtsmanship, harmony, instrumental ranges, and the rest. All teaching or advocating of a style, a sensibility, a philosophy, is pernicious; is pseudo-technology, not art.

59 Show the young sailor how to sail; but don’t so falsify the compass and the chart that he can sail only in one direction.

60 To be an artist is not to be a member of a secret society; it is not an activity inscrutably forbidden to the majority of mankind. Even the clumsiest, ugliest and most ignorant lovers make love; and what is important is the oneness of man in making artefacts, not the abyss said to exist between a Leonardo and the average of mankind. We are not all to be Leonardos; but of the same kind as Leonardo, for genius is only one end of the scale. I climbed Parnassus once, and between the mundane village of Arachova at the foot and the lovely summit, quite as lovely as the poets have always had it to be, there is nothing but a slope; no abyss, no cliff, no place where wings are necessary!

61 A child is not excused from games and physical training because he is not brilliant at them. Only one child in ten cannot be taught music. Poetry has nothing to do with recitation, with learning by heart or reading texts for examination purposes. Poetry is saying what you are in words in rhythmic patterns. Visual art is the same, but in shapes and colours instead of words.

62 An artist, as we understand the word today, is someone who does by nature what we should all do by education. But all our modern technology-biased systems of education concentrate far too much on the science of art, that is, art history and art categorization and art appreciation, and far too little on the personal creation of artefacts; as if diagrams, discussions, photographs and films of games and physical exercise were an adequate substitute for the real thing. It is useless to provide endless facilities for the enjoyment of other people’s art unless there are corresponding facilities for creating one’s own.

63 Freedom is inherent in the best art, as it is in the best science. Both are essentially demolishers of tyranny and dogma; are melters of petrifaction, breakers of the iron situation. To begin with, an artist may oppose merely because he has the power to express opposition; and then one day his own expressed opposition expresses him. His art enlists him. The poem I write today writes me tomorrow. I find the scientific law; and then the law finds me.

GAMES

64 Games, sports and pastimes that require rules and social contact have become increasingly significant in the last century. It was calculated that something like one hundred and fifty million people watched on television the final of the football World Cup in 1966. As with art, we may tend to regard games as a rather unimportant leisure activity. But as leisure increases, so does their influence on our fives.

65 Games are far more important to us, and in far deeper ways, than we like to admit. Some psychologists explain all the symbolic values we attach to games, and to losing and winning them, in Freudian terms. Football consists of twenty-two penises in pursuit of a vagina; a golf club is a steel-shafted phallus; the chess king and queen are Laius and Jocasta; all winning is a form either of evacuation or of ejaculation; and so on. Such explanations may or may not have value in discussing the origin of the game. But for most players and spectators a much more plausible explanation is the Adlerian one, that a game is a system for achieving superiority. It is moreover a system (like money getting) that is to a certain extent a human answer to the inhuman hazard of the cosmic lottery; to be able to win at a game compensates the winner for not being able to win outside the context of the game. This raison d’etre of the game is most clearly seen in the games of pure chance; but many other games have deliberate hazards; and even in games technically free of hazards the bounce, the lie, the fly in the eye exist. The evil is this: from instituting this system of equalizing hazard man soon moves to regarding the winner in it as not merely lucky but in some way excellent; just as he now comes to regard the rich man as in some way intrinsically excellent.*

66 The prestige coveters have always tried to seize sport as their province. This is especially so in times of peace. Much has been made of the nobility of the early Olympic Games, in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, and of their later corruption under the Romans. But the sprig of olive was already too large a prize. Competition, the need to keep equal and the drive to do better, haunts mankind. But there are plenty of real fields for competition without inventing artificial ones.

67 Sport is an opportunity for personal pleasure, a situation where beauty may arise. But what is being contested is never prestige. Simply the game. The winner has more skill or more luck; by winning he is not in any sense in any game necessarily a better human being than the loser.

68 Almost all the great popular sports of the world come from Britain. But what Britain has not been able to export is the amateur ethos of the game. Most foreigners, and now many Britons, want to win at any cost within the rules; and they keep to the rules only because a game without rules is war.

69 There are means-orientated societies, for whom the game is the game; and ends-orientated societies, for whom the game is winning. In the first, if one is happy, then one is successful; in the second, one cannot be happy unless one is successful. The whole tendency of evolution and history suggests that man must become means-orientated if he is to survive.

70 The primary function of all the great human activities art, science, philosophy, religion – is to bring man nearer the truth. Not to win, not to beat another team, not to be invincible. The contemporary fuss about amateurs and professionals is nothing. Any sportsman who plays mainly in order to win, that is, mainly not for the pleasure of playing, is a professional. He may not want money, but he wants prestige, and prestige of this sort is as dirty as gold.

CULPABILITY

71 It is an old saying that crime depends on society; and no doubt the cynical answer, that society depends on crime, is equally old. One of the grimmest modern statistical facts is that not only is crime on the increase, but even on the increase relative to the population increase. And the problem of culpability is, to both society and to an education in humanity, of very far from academic significance.

72 There are two extreme views. One is that all criminals have complete free will; the other is that they have none. We live socially in accordance with the first belief; most of us, as individuals, tend to believe in the second.

73 A judge says to a criminal: the crime you have committed is a dastardly one. But he should say: the action you have done has harmed society, and is a sign that you have a diseased or deficient mind; I apologize to you in the name of society, if insufficient education is to blame, and I sympathize with you as a fellow human, if hereditary factors are to blame; I will now ensure that you have the best possible treatment and care. In the world as it is, no judge would dare to be so preposterously humane because he knows perfectly well that a judge is a dispenser of law, not of justice. We speak of the policy of the nuclear deterrent as if it is a terrible one to have to live under. But ever since the institution of law we have lived under a policy of the deterrent; not under a true human justice. An offer to try to cure is certainly not a sufficient practical deterrent to crime; but neither is a total refusal to try to cure a sufficient social response. There is a mean; and at present we are nowhere near it.

74 A sick man can reasonably hate society for sending him to prison; but not to hospital.

75 In a truly just world, cupability would clearly be a scientific, not a moral, calculation. No society is innocent of the crimes committed in it; we know very well that we call the biologically innocent legally guilty simply for convenience. The old argument here is this: if people start believing they cannot help committing crimes they will start committing those they could have desisted from.

76 But if we concede that a great majority of criminals are not responsible for their crimes, which are really committed by factors over which they have no control (genes, environment, lack of education), the way is free to treat them as we treat any other person who is seriously ill. In genetics we are still helpless; but we can control environment and education. And the education in humanity, which must be designed to alleviate a chief cause of all crime, the sense of inequality that makes social irresponsibility almost a courageous revolutionary gesture, is plainly best suited to establishing such control.

77 An important obstacle to the prevention and proper treatment of criminals is the emotional way in which we view ‘sin’ and ‘crime’. The one is of course a legacy of Christianity; and the other of Greek-Roman law. Both concepts are thoroughly outmoded and widely harmful.

78 They disseminate a shared myth: that an evil deed can be paid for. In one case by penance and remorse; in the other, by accepting punishment. Remorse gives a pleasurable and masochistic illusion that one is, though superficially evil, fundamentally good. Penance and punishment (which share the same root etymologically) appear, when they are completed, simply to define the correct ownership of the crime – and very often its proceeds. I have paid for my house and I have paid for my crime are unhappily similar sentences in their implication.

79 Sin throws an aura of impermissibility round many pleasures. In other words, it glamourizes and heightens them, since to forbid or deny any pleasure greatly increases its enjoyability, on both physical and psychological grounds. The chief ranters against ‘sin’ in history can be numbered among its leading coun-tersupporters. ‘Crime’, in the free-will significance law attaches to the word, is merely a legal equivalent of the religious term.

80 It is of use to examine the existentialist position on culpability. An existentialist says: As well as my good actions, I am my past bad actions; I cannot deny them; if I ignore their having taken place, I am a coward, a child; I can only accept them. From this some modern writers have argued that by deliberately committing a crime and deliberately, without remorse, accepting that I have committed a crime, I can best demonstrate my own existing as a unique individual and my rejection of the world of the others, that is, hypocritical organized society. But this is a romantic perversion of existentialism. I prove I exist not by making senseless decisions or committing deliberate crimes in order that they may be ‘accepted’ and then constitute a proof of the ‘authenticity’ and uniqueness of my existence, because by so acting I establish nothing but my own particular sense of inadequacy in face of external social reality; but I prove I exist by using my acceptance of past and bad actions as a source of energy for the improvement of my future actions or attitudes inside that reality.

81 Existentialism says, in short, that if I commit an evil then I must live with it for the rest of my life; and that the only way I can live with it is by accepting that it is always present in me. Nothing, no remorse, no punishment, can efface it; and therefore each new evil I do is not a relapse, a replacement, but an addition. Nothing cleans the slate; it can become only dirtier.

82 This view of crime is invaluable because it encourages freedom of will; it allows the criminal to believe he can choose, he can shape and balance his life, he can try to be his own master. Joined with the help to be given by psychiatry, it offers the criminal his best chance of never coming back through the prison gates when he is released. We need to ban the dreadful ogres of penal law and penitential religion from our prisons; and we need to regard the period immediately after release in the same way as we regard the same period after a stay in hospital. It is one of convalescence; and no released prisoner should be expected to be capable of immediate normal function in society. He will need economic and psychological support.

83 All actual law is ultimately martial law; and justice is always greater than the law.

ADULTHOOD

84 Another unhappy result of the pressure economic needs exert on our educational systems is the abrupt way we terminate education at far too young an age. In many parts of the world the great majority leave school for ever with the arrival of puberty. When the age of leisure finally comes to the world we can surely hope that this absurdity will stop.

85 The essential factor in evolutionary survival is self-intelligence. The truest and most valuable recompense that the individual can find in being individual (existing) is the same – self-intelligence.

86 It is difficult to acquire any real self-intelligence before the age of thirty. Part of the joy of being young is that one is on the road to self-knowledge, that one has not arrived at it. Yet we consider that even the best general education should be over by the age of twenty-one.

87 There are three stages of self-indulgence: childhood, adolescence and pre-adulthood (the period between eighteen and thirty). We educate a child out of its myths and its monotonous egocentricity; but fewer and fewer dare to correct the adolescent, and no one dares to correct the pre-adult.

88 Our excessive respect for the pre-adult is partly a relic of the times when the physical energy and strength of that age were of high value in surviving; when killing and running counted; and partly a symptom of our intense longing to be ageless.

89 Each age has its own adulthood. A child can be grownup in its own world. But the more advanced societies now teach their young to be adults when they are still adolescents. Teenagers become adept at mimicking adulthood; and thus many people grown in years are really permanent adolescents mimicking adulthood. Social pressures arrest them at a stage of pseudo-adulthood, and impose on them a mask they first assume to look adult and then wear forever afterwards.

90 Adulthood is not an age, but a state of knowledge of self.

ADAM AND EVE

91 The male and female are the two most powerful biological principles; and their smooth inter-action in society is one of the chief signs of social health. In this respect our world shows, in spite of the now general political emancipation of women, considerable sickness; and most of this sickness arises from the selfish tyranny of the male.

92 I interpret the myth of the temptation of Adam in this way. Adam is hatred of change and futile nostalgia for the innocence of animals. The Serpent is imagination, the power to compare, self-consciousness. Eve is the assumption of human responsibility, of the need for progress and the need to control progress. The Garden of Eden is an impossible dream. The Fall is the essential processus of evolution. The God of Genesis is a personification of Adam’s resentment.

93 Adam is stasis, or conservatism; Eve is kinesis, or progress. Adam societies are ones in which the man and the father, male gods, exact strict obedience to established institutions and norms of behaviour, as during a majority of the periods of history in our era. The Victorian is a typical such period. Eve societies are those in which the woman and the mother, female gods, encourage innovation and experiment, and fresh definitions, aims, modes of feeling. The Renaissance and our own are typical such ages.

94 There are of course Adam-women and Eve-men; singularly few, among the world’s great progressive artists and thinkers, have not belonged to the latter category.

95 The petty, cruel and still prevalent antifeminism of Adam-dominated mankind (the very term ‘mankind’ is revealing) is the long afterglow of the male’s once important physical superiority and greater utility in the battle for survival. To the Adam in man, woman is no more than a rapable receptacle. This male association of femininity with rapability extends far beyond the female body. Progress and innovation are rapable; anything not based on brute power is rap-able. All progressive philosophies are feminist. Adam is a princeling in a mountain castle; raids and fortifications, his own power and his own prestige, obsess him.

96 But if Eve had the intelligence to trick Adam out of his foolish dream in the Garden of Eden, she had also the kindness to stick by him afterwards; and it is this aspect of the female principle – tolerance, a general scepticism towards the Adam belief that might is right – that is the most valuable for society. Every mother is an evolutionary system in microcosm; she has no choice but to love what is her child, ugly or arrogant, criminal or selfish, stupid or deformed. Motherhood is the most fundamental of all trainings in tolerance; and tolerance, as we have still to learn, is the most fundamental of all human wisdoms.

SEXUAL FREEDOM

97 Whatever the professional guardians of public morality say, something more than a mere loss of morality and ‘decency’ is involved in sex’s meteoric advent from behind the curtains and crinolines of Victorian modesty and propriety. It may be a flight from chastity; if right judgement is comparing the present generation with past generations, it is a flight from chastity. But it is also a flight to something.

98 In most societies the unofficial attitude to sexual morality now is that at any rate among unmarried adults there is nothing inherently sinful or criminal about sexual experiences and adventures, whether or not they are accompanied by love, which I will define as the desire to maintain a relationship irrespective of the sexual and, in the final analysis, any other enjoyment to be got from it.

99 Adultery is the disproof of a marriage rather than its betrayal; and divorce is a therapeutic means of purging or ending an unhealthy situation. It no longer in normal circumstances has any moral smeU. It is like a visit to an operating theatre. Nature is more likely to be to blame than the individual.

100 But the official attitude, as expressed by churches newspapers, governments, and in many cases by laws, is that coitus before and outside marriage is always in some way sinful and anti-social.

101 The social importance we grant to sex lies very much in this forbidden-allowed tension; this deserved-undeserved, this licit-illicit, this private-public, this defiant-submissive, this rebelling-conforming experience. As in all such situations there is plenty of evidence of countersupporting. ‘Morality’ attacks ‘immorality’ and gets pleasure and energy from it; ‘immorality’ tries to defend itself from or to evade ‘morality’, and gets pleasure and energy from the defence and the evasion.

102 There is of course a fundamental unreality about the official attitude; it is in only a few peripheral areas (such as prostitution and abortion) that its views can be enforced; and if the children know that the farmer can never actually chase them out of most of the orchard with the tempting apples, then of course they have an added inducement to steal them. In any case, we are here dealing with children who would dispute the ownership of the orchard in the first place. We may thus conclude that the opponents of sexual freedom are in fact among its greatest propagators.

103 The result of this ambiguous situation has been the apotheosis of the illicit sexual relationship – illicit, that is, by the standards of official public morality. The time-honoured name for this sort of relationship is the affaire, though the original French phrase (affaire de coeur) suggests precisely what the modern puritans complain is lacking. Our affaires now are much more de corps than de coeur.

104 The dangers of the affaire are well known. Free love does not encourage true love. The emotional instability that gets one into bed is unlikely to change into the emotional stability one needs when one has to get out. Venereal diseases spread. Neuroses spread. Broken marriages increase, and the innocent children of them suffer, and in their turn breed suffering. It is beyond all these formidable monsters, trackless forests, quagmires, dark nights of the soul, that the Holy Grail, the entirely happy affaire, shines. On the other hand there can be detected in many denunciations of it a pathological dislike of sexual pleasure; and a neutral may well find this kind of ‘morality’ as prejudiced as the alleged ‘bestiality’ of the enemy.

105 Sexual attraction and the sexual act are in themselves innocent, neither intrinsically moral nor immoral. Sex is like all great forces: simple a force. We may judge this or that manifestation or situation of the force as moral or immoral; but not the force itself.

106 Coitus is, even at its most animal, the best ritualization of the nature of the whole, of the nature of reality. Part of its mystery is that it has (except as, by current standards, a perversion) to be celebrated in private and learnt in private and enjoyed in private. Part of its pleasure is that it allows infinite variety, both physically and emotionally; in partner and place and mood and manner and time. So the problem may be reduced to this. How can society best allow the individual to experience this profound mystery and variety of pleasure without causing harm?

107 The main sociological argument against the affaire de corps is that it instils a natural taste for promiscuity and therefore encourages adultery. This seems more likely to be true than the counter-argument: that it helps in the eventual choice of a husband or wife and makes a good marriage more probable. This might conceivably be true if young people had the time and the opportunity and the emotional detachment for a wide range of affaires before marriage; but few have. Many such affaires, entered into by psychologically immature and trend-copying young people, lead to disastrous marriages and permanent maladjustments.

108 What in any case is at least as evil as the affaire itself is a situation in which, beckoning in its aura of amoral modernity, it stands as a smart sanctuary, an escape from the pressures of society, as a recompense for having to die, as all sorts of things it partly is but should not essentially be. For in an age where such a relationship still has to be described as officially ilhcit it is obvious that however innocently it is entered and enjoyed, it will be in conflict with all those unpermissive modes of thought and conscience, the communal superego, that society has had us taught.

109 Most adolescents and pre-adults are naturally confused by two drives that mimic each other: the drive towards sexual experience (in itself part of a deeper drive towards the hazardous and adventurous) and the drive towards love as institutionalized in marriage (in itself part of the drive towards certainty and security). They find it difficult to separate the two; what starts as one can in even a few moments become the other. A desire to kiss becomes the desire to live together for a lifetime, the decision to marry becomes the abrupt yearning for another body.

110 Much more of the sexual education of adolescents should be devoted to teaching them the aetiology of love; this is just as important as the physiology of coitus.

111 There is a widespread belief that love and sex are incompatible. That if you have considerable sexual experience you cannot love (Don Juan); and that if you love (maintain a permanent relationship like marriage) you will sooner or later cease to enjoy sex. The belief is strengthened by the regarding of marriage as a mere licensing of sex instead of as an affirmation of love. If you sternly forbid the affaire to the unmarried, you must not expect them to understand marriage for what it should be: the intention to love, not the desire to enjoy coitus licitly.

112 The charm of the illicit sexual experience is sometimes almost as much that it is illicit as that it is sexual. When Meaulnes eventually refound his domaine perdu, domaine sans nom, when at last he met the mysterious Yvonne de Galais again, what did he do? He ran away after the very first night of their marriage.*

113 When the individual is being attacked on all sides by the forces of anti-individuality; by the nemo; by the sense that death is absolute, by the dehumanizing processes of both mass production and mass producing: the affaire represents not only an escape into the enchanted garden of the ego but also a quasi-heroic gesture of human defiance.

114 Just as art is being used by the individual as an outlet for the resentments caused by the inadequacies of society, so is the affaire. It is a day spent playing truant from an excruciatingly dull and wintry school. The whole of contemporary popular art is based on this notion. Listen to the lyrics of ‘pop’ music. Compare the sexuality of a figure like James Bond with that of figures like Maigret or Sherlock Holmes.

115 The same can be said for advertising. Cigarettes are not recommended for their quality as cigarettes but as the right accompaniment to the affaire; recipients, the advertisers say, can be ‘won’, ‘seduced’, ‘enchanted’ (shades of the love philtre) by all sorts of innocent objects – chocolates, pens, jewelry, packaged holidays, and the rest. Similar tendencies can be seen in much car and clothing advertising, though here the appeal is that of the aphrodisiac rather than of the love philtre. This car makes a man more virile; this dress suggests a Messalina. Even fabrics have moral associations woven into them by the publicity men. You no longer buy black leather, you buy its suggestions of sadistic perversion.

116 The extramarital affaire becomes particularly sirenlike after several years of marriage. There is among husbands a kind of nostalgie de la vierge, among wives a longing for a life outside the domestic prison, those grim four walls constituted by husband, children, housework and kitchen. In men the desire seems to be directly sexual. In women it may be a more complex longing. But in both cases it is a flight from reality; and if children are involved, a flight from responsibility.*

117 For the would-be adulterous husband or wife the pressures to enter into an affaire may be less, and the penalties greater, than they are for the unmarried person. The moral issue is generally much clearer; but other factors, such as the sharper sense of failure or dissatisfaction that age brings, the memory of premarital affaires (or the memory of the lack of them), the monotony of marriage and the general climate of a society intoxicated by permissivity, may make the objectively clear issue subjectively harder to see now than ever before in history.

118 Pleasure may come to seem a responsibility; while responsibility may rarely come to seem what it can be, a pleasure. How many marriages break because so many marriages break?

119 When the whole philosophy of a capitalist society can be reduced to this: You owe yourself as much as you can get, whether it be in money, in status, in possessions, in enjoyments, or in experiences. Can pleasure not become a duty?

120 The tendency of any capitalist society is to turn all experiences and relationships into objects, objects that can be assessed on the same scale of values as washing machines and central heating, that is, by the comparative cheapness of the utility and pleasurability to be derived from it. Furthermore, the tendency in an overpopulated and inflation-fearing society is to make things expendable, and therefore to make expendability a virtue and pleasure. Throw the old object away and get a new. As we are haunted by the affaire, so are we haunted by the pursuit of the new, and these ghosts are brothers.

121 Fathers and mothers no longer see their children as children; as they grow they see them increasingly as rivals in the enjoyment race. What is more, rivals who seem bound to win. However harmless it is, whenever a change of social habits brings more pleasure into the world, some older people will object, simply because they had to do without the change when they were young, and others will frantically and foolishly try to catch up. It is not just chastity, morality and marriage that are under attack, but the whole traditional concept of what we are and what we are for.

122 Some suggest that we are moving into an age when it will be considered normal that one should have sexual relationships as one wants and with whom one wants, regardless of other social ties. They say this will be possible because copulation will come to seem no more significant than dancing or conversing as one wants or with whom one wants. In such a society there would be nothing exceptionable about coitus in public; and the queues that now form to see Fonteyn and Nureyev would form to see skilled practitioners in an even older art. We should, in short, have returned to ancient pre-Christian ideas of sex as an activity that does not require any special privacy, nor evoke any special inhibitions. It is dimly possible that this depuritanization of sex will one day take place; but for as long as the present sexual conventions, licit and illicit, supply some deeper need of man in an unsatisfying society, it will not.

123 In an education in humanity the teaching on this matter must surely be based on the following considerations:

(A) One great argument for more teaching of self-analysis, and for more analysis of the self in general, is that half the pain caused by the affaire and the broken marriage, and the very causing itself, is due to the ignorance of each of both each and the other.

(B) The excessive commercialization of sex, and especially of the affaire, is not the brightest jewel in capitalism’s crown.

(C) Of all activities, sex is the least amenable to general judgements. It is always relative, always situational. It is as silly to proscribe it as to prescribe it. All that can be done is to educate about it.

(D) To teach the physiology of sex without the psychology of love is to teach all about a ship except how to steer it.

(E) Spokesmen for ‘morality’ have no right to condemn or to try to prevent any kind of sexual relationship unless they can demonstrate that it is bringing society more unhappiness than happiness. It is always easy to produce illegitimacy, divorce, and veneral disease statistics; but the statistics of sexual happiness are harder to come by.

(F) A child is a law against adultery; and though an adulterer can no longer break the law, he can still break the child. But as children grow, divorce becomes less and less a crime, since the disharmony the growing child increasingly takes note of may do as much harm as the ending of the marriage.

(G) Just as surgery can be abused, so can divorce. But that a thing can be abused is never an argument against it.

(H) The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability.

(I) Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return.

(J) It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for; and every adultery adulterates it, every infidelity betrays it, every cruelty clouds it.

THE INWARD EDUCATION

124 Man should not be, above all, necessary to society; he should be above all necessary to himself. He is not educated until his self has been analysed and he understands the common psychological mechanisms. At present we teach the persona, not the real self. The persona is made up of all the incrustations, however formed, that hide what I really feel and what I really think. It is plain that we must all have some persona; but not that we should hide so much of our real selves as our societies and their educational systems now require. We must not teach how to conform (society does that automatically) but how and when not to conform.*

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE NOW

125 In this universe of mirrors and metaphors, man reflects and parallels all the realities. They are all in each mind, but deep. The infinite process is made finite in each thing; each thing is a cross section of eternity.

126 The end of all evolution is dissolution. This is not absurd. It would be absurd if the end of evolution was the perfect state. It would be absurd if evolution had any other end but dissolution. Evolution is therefore meaningless if it is evolution towards. It is now or nothing. A better state, a better design, a better self, a better world; but always these things beginning now.

127 The whole is not a chain, but a spinning top. The top spins on, but stays in one place. One can point to a link in the chain or a point on the road and say ‘That is the best place to be’; but a top is always in the same place. The weight of the top must be distributed evenly about its central axis, or the top will tilt and wobble. All those tendencies, in so many religious and political philosophies, to think and persuade away from the present life, from the now; those attempts to make us put the great weight and energy of our beliefs and hopes in some other world (heavenly or Utopian) are like erratic movements of weight inside the top. We disperse our powers centrifugally. The real meaning of life is close around the axis of each now.

128 It is not by accident that the discovery of self is not encouraged by the state. An educational system is organized by the state to prolong the state; and the discovery of the self is also often the discovery of what the state really is.

129 Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accept their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in a state are those who have most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have most to say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.

130 State and government are ways of thinking of the then; they are systems of the then. We say ‘He lives in the past and we say it with pity or contempt; yet most of us live in the future.

131 The state does not want to be; it wants to survive.

132 It is true that many of us live in tomorrow because today is uninhabitable. But to make today habitable is not in the interest of the state. It is principally the inadequacies of the state that force man to live in the future; and the main reason for these inadequacies is that the states of the world refuse to act jointly and do these two essential things – depopulate and educate.

INWARD KNOWLEDGE

133 Most of us still carry in our minds the myth of a clearly marked frontier between the healthy and the sick; and perhaps in no area so much as mental health, which happens to be the area where such demarcations are most absurd. The endless fun made of psychiatry, and especially of psycho-analysis, is a sure sign of fear. The ‘healthy’ among us tend to cherish our phobias and neuroses; we do not want them exposed.

134 There is no greater inadequacy in our present systems of education than the attitude to psychology. The notion that school psychologists should devote all their time to the ‘sick’ (the neurotic or backward students) is absurd. The ‘healthy’ need their attention just as much. A key subject in any education in humanity must be general psychology; and a key service must be the personal analysis of each student.

135 This is not the place to discuss the comparative merits of the different schools of psychological theory. But since the psychological aspect of an education in humanity must have a strong social bias, we should certainly pay far more attention to the biological theory of domination-subordinance.

136 This theory has sprung from the study of non-human primates like gorillas and chimpanzees. It has been discovered that their relative domination over or subordinance to one another depends largely on size and (outside the periods when females are in heat) nonsexual factors akin to human self-confidence. Thus a large female and a small male in the same cage will be respectively the dominator and the subordinate; the male will ‘present’ (adopt female copulatory positions) as a sign of submission. We must realize that all humans adopt (or veer between) one or other of these roles, irrespective of sex. The common organizational behaviour known as boot- or arse-licking is a clear example of the subordinate role. The man who goes in for it is metaphorically ‘presenting’; and it is not for nothing that the two commonest obscenities in every language are ‘Fuck you’ and ‘Bugger you’. They are both assertions about dominance, and the nature of the dominated.

137 But of course human beings are not caged and live in far more complex situations; and it is the chain-reaction aspect of this relationship need that is the most dangerous for society. The conscious subordinate in regard to one person will become the more or less aggrieved dominant in regard to another. Human subordinates are generally conscious of their subordination, and the secret displeasures it brings them, and so the road to a compensatory pleasure elsewhere in their lives becomes only too clearly signposted. The general ‘historical resentment’ or sense of inferiority felt by the German people between the two world wars leads straight to the persecution of the Jews. The vicious circle of sado-masochism in society is only too easily and naturally established.

138 Birds provide us with the clearest example of the mechanism nature has evolved to deal with this vicious circle – that is, ‘territory’. In some species, the biological value of nesting in large colonies is so great that their sense of territory is small; and in these species we find highly developed systems of pecking-order. Such species gain both ways. They are defended by sheer numbers; and the ones who get pecked to death are the weakest individuals. Other species, at any rate during the breeding season, establish areas on which no other pair may trespass with impunity. Under this system they are less prone to infectious disease, famine, and so on. That both systems work we may see clearly in the Corvidae (the most ‘intelligent’ bird family) in which closely-related species have adopted different systems. Thus jackdaws and rooks live largely communally; while crows and magpies live largely in pairs or small families.

139 Man utilizes both systems. We defend ourselves and organize our essential needs communally; and it is in these communal situations, which obviously require hierarchies of command and importance, that we see most clearly the workings of the human pecking-order. But we equally demand domains analogous to the territories of the solitary species, in which we can be the dominants. Though we more naturally think of spheres like the home, the garden, the property and possessions we own, as our ‘territory’, we all carry about with us a much more important psychological corpus of emotions and ideas and beliefs. This mental territory governs all our social behaviour, and it is of vital importance that it receives more study and attention in our education, since it is almost certainly the aspect of ourselves that we know least of.

140 A very frequent demarcator of this mental territory is the Jungian complex. A complex is an idea or group of associated ideas about which we cannot think rationally and objectively, but only emotionally and subjectively. Jungian theory explains the complex as the conscious manifestation of unconscious fears and desires; but complexes also serve very well as warnings to other members of the species not to trespass in this area. A crank who maintains that the world is flat may become very angry when he is given clear proofs to the contrary. His anger will certainly not prove his case; but it will often tend to preserve his case from further attack.

141 The prime intention of this mental territory we erect around us is of course to counteract our sense of nemo, of nonentity; and this immediately warns us that it is not sufficient to destroy the vanities, illusions and complexes with which we wall ourselves in (or demarcate ourselves) since thereby we risk destroying identity. What we need to do is to discover what is valid in this demarcation-fortification material; and then to let the discovery of what is valid show to the frightened person inside the fortifications what is invalid.

142 The understanding of the roles subordinate and domination play in our fives; the analysis of what is strictly necessary in the role adopted (or of the way the individual distributes different roles to himself); and establishing the validity of the mental territory’ we attempt to define; these represent the basis for an educational personal analysis of each student. This does not of course preclude analysis based on more familiar psychological theories; the systems of Adler and Karen Homey must be particularly relevant. But this gives most hope of bringing more self-understanding, tolerance and a greater equality in existence to our world.*

143 I can best describe this inward phase of education by giving the questions it should, by the time it is complete, enable its students to answer.

Who am I?

In what ways am I similar to and in what ways different from most other human beings?

What are my duties to myself?

What are my duties towards others?

What are the duties of an employer, an employee, a member of a state, an individual?

To what extent, given my capacities, do I fulfil and balance these conflicting extremes?

What do I mean by love?

What do I mean by guilt?

What do I mean by justice?

What is science to me?

What is art to me?

THE SYNOPTIC EDUCATION

144 This education is concerned with only one thing: why all is as all is. Since we are in the same situation as human beings, it must be identical the world over.

145 It must comprehend the study of the great religions and philosophies of the past – and present – but since its intention is synoptic, they must be presented as interpretations or metaphors of reality. We know that in this domain the truth is always more complex than our formulation of it.

146 It seems to me that the inescapable conclusion of any truly synoptic view of human existence is that the chief aim of evolution is the preservation of matter. Each form of animate matter is given a reason for living; and our human reason is the establishment of equality of recompense in living. Since in our present world unnecessary inequalities are ubiquitous, a proper synoptic education must lead to a sense of discontent that is also a sense of moral purpose.

147 I believe also that it must discredit the notion that God (in the traditional sense) can, in any but the negative way I have described, be presumed to have human characteristics or powers; in short, we will do better to assume there is no such God.

148 Finally it will destroy our last childish belief in an afterlife, through which, like a hole in a bucket, real life leaks away. If death is absolute, life is absolute; life is sacred; kindness to other life is essential; today is more than tomorrow; noon conquers night. To do is now, living; death is never able to do.

149 Everything finally is means, nothing is end. All we call immortal is mortal. What a nuclear holocaust may do, time certainly will do. So live now, and teach it.

150 The mystery is not in the beginning or the end, but in the now. There was no beginning; there will be no end.