WHAT HAS GONE WRONG?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 277, 13 October 1944, Page 10

WHAT HAS GONE WRONG?

\| From a talk by

MICHAEL

POLANYI

in the Home i |

| Service Series of the BBC !

Hungarian Professor Looks Back at the Europe He Knew

OT many of us, I think, realise as yet what we have lost on the Continent of Europe. I was born and brought up on the Continent and now I teach chemistry at Manchester University. I am not much over 50, yet sometimes when I am face to face with my students I feel little better than a relic of civilisation which has long been submerged. As I was talking to one of my students the other day, I mentioned that in my youth I had never seen a passport. He asked me whether I had never travelled at that time, and was astonished to hear that you could travel right through without a labour permit or any other permit. He could scarcely believe it when I told him that in my youth I would not have understood what is meant by "concentration camp" and that there were so few refugees of any kind that I would probably never have heard of them. Yes, we were very free and very tolerant on the Continent of

Europe before the last war. And yet within my own lifetime freedom and tolerance have been submerged under totalitarian governments through wide ranges of the Continent. Who Started It? My generation-the generation of modern intellectuals to which I belongentered on its heritage at the opening of this century with immense hopes for the future. Science was our Pole-star. Guided by science we were determined to make a clean sweep of all ancient stupidities, of all silly obstructions to human happiness, and to rearrange life in a thoroughly rational and scientific fashion. Could anything be more sensible? What then has gone wrong? Were we set upon by reactionaries; did they carry the day and defeat our aspirations? Was that how the transformation started in Europe? No, I believe that is hardly the truth of the matter. The downward course of liberty began, on the contrary, with a great victory of the progressive movement. The revolutionaries of our

time who started the transformation were a group of highly-gifted and most modernly-educated people. As to the scientific outlook: they claimed to be the first politicians ever to possess such an outlook. Their political methods were based on what our generation thought to be the scientific view of man: the view that man was fundamentally an animal; that man’s ideals were merely passing shadows while his appetites were firm, tangible; and eternal forces. They taught that in politics sentiments could make no real difference and self-interests alone were decisive. They argued that social progress could be achieved only by smashing up the class holding power and replacing it by a new class. Naturally you may say that in a way these theories remained only on paper. At least the great revolutionaries were full of sympathy and generosity even while they declared these sentiments to be useless and misleading. Yes, that is true, But their human passions only con(continued on next page)

"England Seemed Remote and Queer"’

(continued from previous page) firmed their determination to remain adamant in their political methods. To stop at nothing and to take no chances, and to impose their rule, when assuming power, relentlessly on every particle of human life. Such was, I think, the first origin of totalitarianism in Europe. The first blow against freedom and tolerance was struck by my own scientificallyminded generation who would suffer no obstruction in achieving what appeared to them the necessary progress of mankind. But what about the Nazis and Fascists? Surely their gangs were actuated by sheer lust of power; by no higher considerations than greed? Did the Mussolinis and Hitlers, the Goebbels and Himmlers derive any of their ideas from any kind of scientific outlook? Yes, I think in their own way they did. Take the typical Nazi. His beastliness is not that of the untaught savage. No, his inhumanity is of a highly sophisticated kind. He is beastly because he believes that the beast alone in man is real. He is not ignorant of morality, but he disposes it as worthless cant. He may not lack natural kindness, but’ he has stamped it out fanatically from his own heart. His evil instincts are firmly grounded in a theory that lust and power are real. Remember that the Nazi comes from a nation unsurpassed in the number and high standard of its universities. There can be no doubt, I believe, that his mentality is a logical expression of the scientific outlook as accepted on the Continent at the opening of this century. "England Seemed an Anachronism" I suppose this account of Continental history sounds very remote and queer in England to-day. But I assure you that England herself appeared very remote and queer to us modern intellectuals on the Continent at the opening of this century. In our eyes Victorian England was a curious sort of anachronism. Here, we were told, still survived scientists who believed in God; and the great Charles Darwin himself had been a religous believer. Labour leaders in Britain preached in church, and highly-educated people kept worrying about the opinions of bishops on birth-control. They seemed not to have heard of class war; nor of the discovery that morality is a purely conventional matter and that physical power alone is a real force in history. Though Britain was rather admired in various other ways, in these respects she -and of course America as Wwell-ap-peared hopelessly backward in the eyes of advanced people on the Continent. However, some of us have travelled a long way since these early days. Today I feel that if the English-speaking nations were backward in accepting the modern Continental views, they were backward only on a path of terror and disaster. I think now that this kind of backwardness has probably saved Britain and America from national disintegration and from the fate of totalitarian subjection which many great peoples of the Continent were doomed to undergo. ‘What Can We Hope For? How long can the English-speaking world hold out against the trend which has engulfed the Continent? How long can they resist the kind of conception of man and society, apparently based on science, which destroys faith in human

ideals and hence undermines freedom and tolerance? Have the English-speak-ing countries not been invaded already, during the inter-war period, by a process called "moral disillusion"? Have they not received their first training in class war and also in the practice of -national opportunism? Is their immunity against the scientific outlook of the Continent not dissolving before our eyes? Surely, unless the main body of Europe regains its moral faith and restores freedom and tolerance again, the English-speaking peoples, and their friends in Continental Europe holding to the same ideals, could not maintain their ideals and their freedom for long? What then can we hope for? We live in a scientific age. No conviction can survive in our’ midst which is contrary to the teachings of science. The question is: must science teach a materialist view of-man and society? Or can we assert, in contradiction to the Continental outlook, that it teaches faith in ideals? Yes, I think we can. Every discovery of science has its starting-point in a guess which is yet much more than a guess, and represents an act of faith. In fact, the scientific method as a whole must be taken on faith by the scientist before .he can even make a start in science. To become a scientist he must unquestionably accept the main body of scientific tradition and fully adhere to the ideals transmitted by that tradition. In this light the triumphs of science confirm rather than impair the roots of our Christian civilisation. They testify to the power of traditional ideals om which our civilisation rests. The new | scientific outlook which I see approaching will clearly recognise that science is only one form of truth which is of the same substance as all the other forms of truth. It will recognise that we cannot believe in science without becoming involved in the whole range of human ideals of which the ideal of science is only the youngest sister, In this light science may help in reconquering our faith in traditional ideals.