"THE HUMAN MIND HAS GOT TO JUMP"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 361, 24 May 1946, Page 18

"THE HUMAN MIND HAS GOT TO JUMP"

Problem of the Individual and _ the Nation-State

(A BBC Talk by

JOHN MIDDLETON

MURRY

N order to react successfully to the vast increases of power which he then saw coming, Henry Adams said in 1905 that the human mind would "need to jump." The jump would be necessary (he thought) about 1938. Well, it did not happen.’ But now, with the atom bomb, the necessity stares us in the face. The human mind has to jump, or the species perish. Plenty of individual minds have made the jump-or believe they are ready to. But that does not make much difference. The paradoxical fact we have to get into our heads is that the individual person nowadays is not real. He is a kind of illusion. The truth is that though the power at the disposal of mankind has increased a thousand times in the last hundred years, it is not the individual person who possessés or controls the power. He is not a thousand times more powerful than his ancestor. It is only as the member of a nationstate that he shares that power. In other words, Man is the nation-state. If we say the human mind has to jump, what we mean is that the mind of the nation- state has to jump. Vaguely, we all know that. Yet at the same time we persist in believing that the individual person is very real. And somehow between these two contradictory realisations our sense of reality is blurred. Naturally enough. It is very hard indéed to think that one’s own reality is primarily social, that one’s centre of gravity, so to speak, is outside oneself. And it is particularly hard because the emphasis for so long has been upon the supreme reality of the individual person. This reached a culmination in the belief which prevailed a hundred years ago that, if the individual freely pursued his own satisfactions, universal harmony would ensue That was the blessed theory of "the harmony of interests"; and, by and large, we can say it was the general belief of English-speaking men all through the 19th Century. Such-a habit of mind, slowly formed during two centuries and apparently justified by results, is tremendously hard to eradicate-even in the minds of those who see it has got to be eradicated. : : The Myth of the Arch-Villain A hundred years ago Karl Marx put forward the revolutionary proposition that Man, in reality, was quite different , from the idea he had of himself. He was in fact "the complex of social relations." That was quite incomprehensible and neglected accordingly. But to-day it is beginning to penetrate. Man has endured two shattering world wars which

a majority of individual men did not desire or will. We try to escape the mental revolution that is required of us by putting all the blame on the other fellow. It was the Kaiser: it was Hitler. It isn’t just humbug on our part. It is mainly because it is too difficult to think anything else. As individuals, we say to ourselves quite truly: "We didn’t want these wars." And the only explanation which seems to fit is that some evil villains made war upon us. When we are told that the Germans, too, as individuals did not want these wars, at first we just cannot believe it. It does not make sense. But gradually we are forced to believe it. Nobody now seriously argues that the Germans, or the Kaiser, were solely responsible for World War I. Vaguely, we admit that everybody shared the responsibility for that one. But this one now. That’s different. The Germans, the Nazis, Hitler, were solely to blame. Nevertheless, the individual English and American soldier is discovering Once more that the individual German is surprisingly like himself, and did not want the war any more than he did. And so the bewilderment grows. The individuals, English and German, are much the same-ordinary decent human beings; yet en masse, they have spent six years trying to ennihilate one another. And the only solution to the paradox is a choice between two lines ‘of thought which seem equally impossible. Either we can say that the individual is real-that the individual Englishman and the individual German really are what they seem to each other (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous’ page) to be; but that, unfortunately, they are quite impotent. They behave quite differently from what they are. Or we can say: the individual person is a kind of illusion. The reality is something else, somewhere else. The reality is the Nation-State. It does not matter much which ones you choose. Either thought is horribly disturbing-it drives you almdét crazy. No wonder that men try to avoid them, and take the simple way of escape by believing that there was an arch-villain, who deliberately destroyed the terrestrial paradise. The escape is simple; but it is horribly dangerous. It leads direct to behaviour of a kind that perpetuates the evil of war; it leads to monstrous injustice of the victors towards the vanquished, and the passionate resentment that monstrous injustice creates. I fear that the injustice already done after this war is so great that it may engender a mood of sheer nihilism in its victims. Wanted: A Mental Revolution The only basis for justice is under-standing-the understanding of the real situation in which all mankind is involved, And the trouble is that to understand the real situation demands a men- tal revolution. The fact of the matter is simple enough. The vast increase of the power at the disposal of man has been turned to his destruction, because it has been fitted to obsolete patterns of human behaviour. These patterns were formed in the long centuries when the increases of power were so gradual that during a whole thousand years the energy at man’s. disposal remained roughly the same. But a hundred years ago man began to pass into a new dimension of experience-a new kind of human history. He is now in the midst of the greatest revolution, by far, that has ever happened to man since he became a distinct species of animal. And I think it is certain that unless there is a mental revolution, taking shape in an utterly new behaviour pattern, the species will simply annihilate itself.

Thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of individual human beings would agree with me in this. Yet they are impotent. Even in the remaining democracies where they could hope to influence the Government, they are still a small minority. In a totalitarian society they do not count at all. Yet it is the mind and behaviour of nation-states towards one another that has to be changed. So far from that showing any sign of revolutionary newness, you have a more naked struggle than ever before of great nation-states to increase-their own power. Britain, it is true, is beginning to hesi-tate-to shown signs of change. Its spokesmen have begun at least to speak of the necessity of pooling sovereignty. That is the beginning of a mental revolution: but it is too abstract, and above all, it is too slow. The human mind has got to jump. Christianity Should Lead Now it is my private conviction that Christianity ought to be working double time to speed up this mental revolution, for two reasons; first because it is

the religion, par excellence, of mental revolution; second, because the Christian Church is essentially supernational. Unless it is that, it just is not the Christian Church, but something that has tisurped its place. I am not pretending that these two things together make Christianity the destined instrument of the jump into the new social mind. They do not. Because the Christianity that actually exists is weak precisely in these two essentials where it should be strong-in encouraging mental revolution and in effective super-nationalism. Nine tenths of Christianity is swallowed up by nationalism to-day, and that sets it against the mental revolution required. But I can never get it out of my head and heart that Christianity ought to be giving the lead in making the jump to the new social mind. And there is something else as well. Christianity resisted the realisation that the individual person was largely an illusion, because it wanted to encourage the illusion of individual reality. By encouraging that, it did two things; it.encouraged an irrelevant piety, and it avoided coming to grips with the real problem: which was to Christianise the nation-state. That was the only kind of evangelisation that really mattered. By clinging to the belief that the individual man is the primary reality, it flattered him, indeed, but it burked its job. In the Quaker phrase, it did not speak to his condi tion. No wonder he has ceased to reply. What I am asking is that Christianity should struggle openly to Christianise the nation-state — to make it behave quite differently, to persuade it to an utterly new delicacy of behaviour at home and abroad to correspond witn the new incredible power it develops and commands. I am asking that it should realise once for all, and quickly, that the real behaviour of men is the behaviour of the nation-states to which they belong; and that the real measure of the strength of Christianity in the world to-day is not the number of people it persuades into its Churches, but the actual. conduct of the nation-states towards one another. I am asking that Christianity shall be political; I am asking that Christianity shall be supernational, in word and deed. I am asking that it shall speak to the real condition of man; that it shall give him guidance in his profound perplexity; that it shall help hig mind to make the jump without which he will perish. I am asking that the Church shall do its job-which is to save humanity, or show it how it can save itself.

If I am told that I am a heretic who misconceives the nature and purpose of the Christian Church; if I am told that the mission of the Church is indeed to save humanity, but not in my sens? at all; if I am told that the Church is not here to save humanity, in this life, but to save it in the next-what shall I reply? I shall reply, quite simply, that I do not believe it. But, if it is so, then let the Church get on with its job, as though it really believed in it. If that is what it is, an institution for saving humanity in the next world, and hope in this, it has plenty to do, and to do quickly, .