REION OF ANARCHY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 October 1939, Page 6

REION OF ANARCHY

WORLD’S GREATEST EVIL. . “Anarchy has been the staple theme of the world’s news during the past few years, and has confirmed the force of Sophocles’s dictum that ‘There is no greater evil than anarchy.’ Lawlessness has achieved a triumph such as none could have imagined a little while ago. with the result that Bentham’s contention that ‘Tyranny and anarchy are never far asunder,’ has an ever-widening practical application.” said Sir Harold Bellman, in a commencement address at the University of Washington, United States (a privileged occasion for an Englishman). “To mention culture in this context may savour of the classic encounter between an immovable object and an irresistible force. Yet culture, if over-shadowed, is not quite irrelevant. In varying relationships culture and anarchy have shared the earth for many centuries. “For centuries the Western nations have pinned their hopes on culture as the subjugating force of anarchy, both within 'nations and between nations. Matthew Arnold himself held that culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish. Moreover, man does not seem always and everywhere predisposed towards anarchy. Anthropologists record the social harmony of the group-life of the most primitive peoples. On the whole, the basis of our optimism seemed reasonably solid.

“Culture is, to select Professor Whitehead's definition, ‘activity of thought and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling.' Glance at the implications of the main heads of this definition. ‘Activity of thought’ as contrasted with passive acceptance of things as they are; thus intellectual complacency is the antithesis of culture. ‘Receptiveness to beauty’— man is more than a mammal with a refined stomach; culture presupposes a delight in the satisfaction of nonmaterial values. 'Humane feeling’ —the compassion which, in understanding all things, forgives all things; for there can be no culture without a generous sensibility, and an intuitive sympathy for the highest, and an instinctive revulsion from the lowest.

“By this definition a shepherd tending his flock on a solitary hillside may be cultured in the true sense of the word, while a more sophisticated town dweller, despite a formal education and an economic standard conventionally in advance of the shepherd s, may be utterly destitute so far as the riches of culture are concerned. “Culture, then, has little or nothing to do with such mechanics as factabsorption; the merely well-informed are among the most useless creatures on God’s earth. Nor does culture postulate specific creeds or machinery. Rather it is more concerned with values, and with a technique of assessment of values. Thus defined, culture is both an end in itself and a means to an end. “The library shelves of the world groan under the burden of elaborately classified fact, but the world is very far from suffering excesses of sweetness and light. Thus the agencies of culture have a formidable, but. I hope not forbidding, problem. Every agency of culture from the kindergarten to the university should be mobilised. If civilisation is to be saved and made secure it will be saved and I say this with conviction —not on the battlefield, but in the schoolroom. For even if there should be a world war the armed, forces, so far from solving problems, will merely create problen * which can only be solved finally (it they arc solved at all) in the classroom.

’ . “During the Great War, according to tradition, an aggressive woman warworker mot an Oxford man who latei became a professor oi poetry in that university and asked him what wai work he was doing. ‘Madam.’ he replied, ‘1 am the civilisation for which they arc fighting.' An Oxford wit may not be impervious to an enemy bullet, but it helps to make civilisation more worth saving.

“The universities, as the fountainhead of the educational system, boar special responsibilities. “The democratic way depends for its working upon the worth of man as an individual; if he is looked upon as no more than a consumer in a market analysis—making the graph rise a little more steeply here or fall a fraction there —we arc bound to encounter troubles ahead. Again culture must concern itself not only with mak-

ing civilisation worth saving, but also with creating aptitudes which will make it workable, "The spread of true culture might well confer another advantage on the democratic system. At present its most fervent admirer is aware of disconcerting time-lags between thought and its translation into policy. The late Professor Dicey, of Oxford, in his classic thought not. strictly contemporary work on the 'Relations Between Laws and Public Opinion’ (which consists of lectures originally delivered at Harvard) claimed that 'the opinion which changes the law is . . . as often as not in reality the opinion not of today, but of yesterday.’ The teachers who applied the arguments on which the change is made may be in their graves when the reform is achieved. "Conceivably, this will bo regarded by some as an impossible ideal. It is doubtful whether sympathy need be wasted on such an objection. For in so far as mankind has progressed at all, it had done so in response to a standard always in advance of its immediate situation, and. indeed, it is this responsiveness to the magnetism of the higher ideal which redeems the story of the human struggle and is the justification of such hopes as we have for the future.”