BRITAIN'S BRAINS TRUST

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 20, 9 October 1944, Page 29

BRITAIN'S BRAINS TRUST

FROM THE NEW STATESMAN & NATION May 27 • 1944 ★ by C-E-M JOad

The fuss dies down, the dust begins to settle, and the nine days’ wonder passes into its tenth day, as the Brains Trust, tamed and groomed, subsides into an established national institution for the weekly delivery of decorous lecturettes by eminent persons in reply to guaranteed non-inflammable questions. The original association of Huxley, Campbell, and myself on the Brains Trust was largely accidental ; yet the combination proved unexpectedly effective. The public liked to hear the scrapping which Huxley and I brought to the discussion of such questions as the relation between the brain and the mind ; it liked still more to hear Campbell keeping his end up with both of us — when he was clearly shown to be wrong by Huxley or even, on occasion, by myself, he would get scores of letters from sympathetic listeners testifying to their faith and trust in him—-and on occasion hitting the bowling all round the wicket. For example, after Campbell had made the country roar with laughter by his illustration of the use of the word “ allergic ” from persons who could not eat marmalade because it made their head steam, he discomfited the scoffers by triumphantly producing letters from marmalade-head-steamers congratulating him on his knowledge of their peculiarity. The Brains Trust also introduced thousands of people for the first time to the interchange of ideas. At its best it conveyed the suggestion of a good afterdinner discussion between educated persons on matters in regard to which the truth is not known. Thus listening gave many people the sense of enjoying a new

experience. It was, again, a source of perennial satisfaction to hear the experts caught out . . . These were only some of the many incidental reasons for the popularity of the Brains Trust. For the root causes I think one must go deeper. I venture to suggest three. First, that there exists among people an accumulated fund of unexpected seriousness. There has been a good deal of sporadic evidence of this during the war. Army classes and discussion groups, A.B.C.A. lectures, Mass Observation reports indicating renewed interest in religious questions, the revival of music to which the success of C.E.M.A. testifiesall these are straws that show which way the wind is blowing. The Brains Trust is, I think, the outstanding piece of evidence. Nor is the fact surprising. There have been ages crueller, wickeder, more brutal, but never so silly an age as the one before the war. Eight out of nine of us did no serious reading of any kind after we left school at fourteen ; only io per cent, had contact with any religious organization, and by most of us the questions with which religion has historically concerned itself were ignored. It was not that they were not answered ; they were not asked. Very few young people, less than 2 per cent, of those under twenty-three, were members of a political party. The press, I think, consistently underrated the underlying seriousness of a public whom it fed with crosswords, football pools, crime stories, sex stories, and snippets of gossip and gobbets of news, on the assumption that the powers of the average man’s concentration were exhausted by two minutes’ reading on

any one topic. Women in particular suffered from under-stimulated minds. It was this unexploited vein of seriousness in the public that the Brains Trust tapped. The mail-bag of a regular member of the Brains Trust was a revelation. “ I am isolated,” people would say, “ I have nobody to talk to. I would like to read about philosophy or science or psychology, but I don’t know what books to read and I have nobody to tell me.” One was •astonished at the extent of people’s information usually misapplied, or erudition almost always unappreciated. What a lot of books and pamphlets have been written which nobody ever reads ; what a lot of theories are gestated which nobody understands ; what an immense mass of unsuspected ■cerebration goes on in the minds of unacknowledged thinkers. During the last three years I must have had well over a thousand letters conforming to the following stock-draft type : — Dear Mr. Joad, — “ I always listen to the Brains Trust ■with the greatest interest, and appreciate your contributions in particular . I am astonished at the wealth of your knowledge. All this makes it the more surprising that you should have made such an unmitigated fool of yourself ■over ...” Over whatever it was ! Enclosed with the letters were a batch of pamphlets written by the author, and guides to Swedenborg or Ouspenski or Christian Science, or Spiritualism, or Rosicrucianism, or Astrology, or Theosophy, or Herbert Spencer, or Mrs. Eddy, or whoever or whatever it was that would put me right. Secondly, there is the failure of popular -education to satisfy the people’s needs

or to win their interests. Something, it is clear, is radically wrong with our educational system if we are to judge by results, of which one is the bringing-up and sending into the world of a generation of.you ng people who, taking them by and large, are without the desire to read or the habit of reading. “On a train journey not one in a hundred,” I said, “ can be seen reading a book.” "But that,” I admonished myself, “ is plainly an exaggeration.” So I set out to put it to the test. The train, from Edinburgh to London, takes normally nine hours, and on this occasion

was an hour late. It was full of soldiers. They had long exhausted their somewhat slender resources of conversation; the mild delights of looking out of the window had palled hours ago ; there they sat hour after hour bored and low, and to not one in a hundred did it occur to relieve their boredom by reading. For I went through the train counting—counting soldiers and airmen of all ranks, and I reached number one hundred and four before I found my first book reader. He was reading No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The 8.8. C. was hailed as a great potential educator of adults, and there have been many gallant efforts to make good its early promise. On the whole they must be written off as failures. Like so many educational institutions in this country, like the University Extension lectures, attended by their select coteries of the cultured, like the W.E.A., with its seventy thousand gallant students, it has succeeded in appealing only to an unrepresentative handful. Education in England is for the mass of the people a thing apart. It is conducted in a vacuum ; or was until the Brains Trust idea provided a new bridge to link education and the people. No doubt

the Brains Trust offered hors d’oeuvres rather than a meal, but the hors d’oeuvres were consumed by the million and appetites were whetted. Of course, we said some silly things, and it was humiliating to be reminded in an Oxford common room of some sickly little halftruth which the spur of the moment had pricked out of one. But then we had no straw with which to drop our bricks, and it was never clear to me anyway, what Oxford dons were doing with radio sets at 8.15 on a Tuesday night. The encouraging thing was that out of the hundreds of letters that I received, a fairly steady percentage were from those who asked, “ What books can I read ? “ What classes can I attend ? ” “ How can I study for a degree ? ” Huxley, no doubt, can say the same. The beginnings, then, of a new technique of popular education for those who, wanting to study, to read, to think, had nevertheless remained aloof from the institutions which exist to cater for their need. Thirdly, the Brains Trust broke through, if only for a time, the glaze of 8.8. C. gentility. The 8.8. C. is part of the Civil Service at least in this : that its dominating objective is to avoid a row as symbolized by a question in Parliament. There may be good reasons

for this attitude in a Government Department, but it seems to me to be disastrous in an institution one of whose objects should be the promotion and stimulation of thought. Thought is formed and guided by the vigorous advocacy of different points of view, irrespective of their truth or falsehood ; yet we look tothe radio in vain for the vigorous expressions of strongly held opinions.. Where the canvas of controversy should be painted—overpainted, if you will — in blacks and whites, the 8.8. C. gives us only a monochrome of grey. The world is as full as ever of fools and scoundrels, but whatever is said must not offend the scoundrels or provoke the fools.. The expression of strongly held opinion always offends somebody. Therefore, it is concluded, there must be no strong expression of vigorously held opinion. The 8.8. C., in fact, proceeds upon the assumption that nothing must be said, over the microphone which could produce a ripple of disagreement in the still waters of the minds of Tory maiden aunts, born two-thirds of a century ago and living on —for such do not die—into a different age in the closes of cathedral towns. When Quintin Hogg once attacked me on a Brains Trust with heat and feeling, calling me an old man whose views had helped to-

bring on this war in the past, and, if persisted in, would bring on another war in the future, there was the devil of a fuss. The 8.8. C. was deluged with protests, and I received a couple of hundred, letters from soft-hearted persons anxious to express their sympathy with the victim of Mr. Hogg’s unprovoked attack. For my part, I was unable to see what the fuss was about. Why shouldn’t a man say what he thinks, and say it as forcibly as he thinks it ? It was only because the--8.8. C. had for so long soothed our ears with radio syrup, administered to us by decorous voices, inculcating platitudes with Oxford accents, that people were shocked.

Now, for a time the Brains Trust broke through this tradition. In its ■early days when the Trust was comparatively unimportant, we said what we liked and answered questions on religion and politics. Presently religion dropped ■out altogether — under pressure, the 8.8. C. made a clean breast of this—and the questions on politics grew fewer and fewer, although the 8.8. C. never admitted that there was a virtual ban on political discussion. Finally, a point was reached at which not even the mildest of political questions could be ventured upon. Thus, to cite a couple ■of examples that came within my own experience, where dozens could be given, the Brains Trust was not allowed to answer the questions, “ What are the ■causes of anti-Semitism ? ” “ What is the difference between a Conservative, a Liberal, a Socialist, and a Communist ? ” Meanwhile the 8.8. C. was giving itself marks for permitting on the Brains Trust free discussion.

Howard Thomas is, no doubt, right in thinking that the popularity of the Brains Trust was largely due to the interplay of personalities, but; as the hubbub increased, one was bound to ask oneself, popularity to what end ? And, for me, the end was education. The Brains Trust served this end by virtue of its ability to guide listeners through the rapids of controversy and to plunge them at last into the dark and bracing waters of thought. I venture, then, to claim that to an institution which has increasingly come to equate controversy with sin, the Brains Trust has done service by bringing back something of the great English tradition of discussion, disagreement, plain speaking, even on occasion of invective.

(Britain's Brains Trust, by

is available through your A.E.W.S.

Library.)