On Youthful Cynicism
Any person who visits the Universities
of the Western world is liable to be struck by the fact that the intelligent
young of the present day are cynical to a far greater extent than was the case
formerly. This is not true of Russia, India, China or Japan; I believe it is
not the case in Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, and Poland, nor by any means universally
in Germany, but it certainly is a notable characteristic of intelligent youth
in England, France and the United States. To understand why youth is cynical
in the West, we must also understand why it is not cynical in the East.
Young men in Russia are not cynical because
they accept, on the whole, the Communist philosophy, and they have a great country
full of natural resources, ready to be exploited by the help of intelligence.
The young have therefore a career before them which they feel to be worth while.
You do not have to consider the ends of life when in the course of creating
Utopia you are laying a pipeline, building a railway, or teaching peasants to
use Ford tractors simultaneously on a four-mile front. Consequently the Russian
youth are vigorous and filled with ardent beliefs.
In India the fundamental belief of the
earnest young is in the wickedness of England: from this premiss, as from the
existence of Descartes, it is possible to deduce a whole philosophy. From the
fact that England is Christian, it follows that Hinduism or Mohammedanism, as
the case may be, is the only true religion. From the fact that England is capitalistic
and industrial, it follows, according to the temperament of the logician concerned,
either that everyone ought to spin with a spinning-wheel, or that protective
duties ought to be imposed to develop native industrialism and capitalism as
the only weapons with which to combat those of the British. From the fact that
the British hold India by physical force, it follows that only moral force is
admirable. The persecution of nationalist activities in India is just sufficient
to make them heroic, and not sufficient to make them seem futile. In this way
the Anglo-Indians save the intelligent youth of India from the blight of cynicism.
In China hatred of England has also played
its part, but a much smaller part than in India because the English have never
conquered the country. The Chinese youth combine patriotism with genuine enthusiasm
for Occidentalism, in the way that was common in Japan fifty years ago. They
want the Chinese people to be enlightened, free and prosperous, and they have
their work cut out to produce this result. Their ideals are, on the whole, those
of the nineteenth century, which in China has not yet begun to seem antiquated.
Cynicism in China was associated with the officials of the Imperial regime and
survived among the warring militarists who have distracted the country since
1911, but it has no place in the mentality of the modern intellectuals.
In Japan the outlook of young intellectuals
is not unlike that which prevailed on the Continent of Europe between 1815 and
1848. The watchwords of Liberalism are still potent; parliamentary government,
liberty of the subject, free thought and free speech. The struggle against traditional
feudalism and autocracy is quite sufficient to keep young men busy and enthusiastic.
To the sophisticated youth of the West
all this ardour seems a trifle crude. He is firmly persuaded that having studied
everything impartially, he has seen through everything and found that there
is `nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.' There are, of course,
plenty of reasons for this in the teachings of the old. I do not think these
go to the root of the matter, for in other circumstances the young react against
the teaching of the old and achieve a gospel of their own. If the Occidental
youth of the present day react only by cynicism, there must be some special
reason for this circumstance. Not only are the young unable to believe what
they are told, but they seem also unable to believe anything else. This is a
peculiar state of affairs, which deserves investigation. Let us first take some
of the old ideals one by one and see why they no longer inspire the old loyalties.
We may enumerate among such ideals religion, country, progress, beauty, truth.
what is wrong with these in the eyes of the young?
Religion. - The trouble here is
partly intellectual, partly social. For intellectual reasons few able men have
now the same intensity of religious belief as was possible for, say, St. Thomas
Aquinas. The God of most moderns is a little vague, and apt to degenerate into
a Life Force or a `power not ourselves that makes for righteousness'. Even believers
are concerned much more with the effects of religion in this world than with
that other world they profess to believe in; they are not nearly so sure that
this world was created for the glory of God as they are that God is a useful
hypothesis for improving this world. By subordinating God to the needs of this
sublunary life, they cast suspicion upon the genuineness of their faith. They
seem to think that God, like the Sabbath, was made for man. There are also sociological
reasons for not accepting the Churches as the basis of modern idealism. The
Churches, through their endowments, have become bound up with the defense of
property. Moreover, they are connected with an oppressive ethic, which condemns
many pleasures that to the young appear harmless and inflicts many torments
that to the sceptical appear unnecessarily cruel. I have known earnest young
men who accepted wholeheartedly the teaching of Christ; they found themselves
in opposition to official Christianity, outcasts and victims of persecution,
quite as much as if they had been militant atheists.
Country. - Patriotism has been in
many times and places a passionate belief to which the best minds could give
full assent. It was so in England in the time of Shakespeare, in Germany in
the time of Fichte, in Italy in the time of Mazzini. It is so still in Poland,
China, and Outer Mongolia. In the Western nations it is still immensely powerful:
it controls politics, public expenditure, military preparations, and so on.
But the intelligent youth are unable to accept it as an adequate ideal; they
perceive that it is all very well for oppressed nations, but that as soon as
an oppressed nation achieves its freedom, the nationalism which was formerly
heroic becomes oppressive. The Poles, who had the sympathy of idealists ever
since Maria Teresa `wept but took', have used their freedom to organize oppression
in Ukrainia. The Irish, upon whom the British had inflicted civilization for
eight hundred years, have used their freedom to pass laws preventing the publication
of many good books. The spectacle of the Poles murdering Ukrainians and the
Irish murdering literature makes nationalism seem a somewhat inadequate ideal
even for a small nation. But when it comes to a powerful nation, the argument
is even stronger. The Treaty of Versailles was not very encouraging to those
who had the luck not to be killed in defending the ideals which their rulers
betrayed. Those who during the war averred that they were combating militarism
became at its conclusion the leading militarists in their respective countries.
Such facts have made it obvious to all intelligent young men that patriotism
is the chief curse of our age and will bring civilization to an end if it cannot
be mitigated.
Progress. - This is a nineteenth-century
ideal which has too much Babbitt about it for the sophisticated youth. Measurable
progress is necessarily in unimportant things, such as the number of motor-cars
made, or the number of peanuts consumed. The really important things are not
measurable and are therefore not suitable for the methods of the booster. Moreover,
many modern inventions tend to make people silly. I might instance the radio,
the talkies, and poison gas. Shakespeare measured the excellence of an age by
its style in poetry (see Sonnet XXXII), but this mode of measurement is out
of date.
Beauty. - There is something that
sounds old-fashioned about beauty, though it is hard to say why. A modern painter
would be indignant if he were accused of seeking beauty. Most artists nowadays
appear to be inspired by some kind of rage against the world so that they wish
rather to give significant pain than to afford serene satisfaction. Moreover
many kinds of beauty require that a man should take himself more seriously than
is possible for an intelligent modern. A prominent citizen in a small city State,
such as Athens or Florence, could without difficulty feel himself important.
The earth was the center of the Universe, man was the purpose of creation, his
own city showed man at his best, and he himself was among the best of his own
city. In such circumstances Æschylus or Dante could take his own joys
or sorrows seriously. He could feel that the emotions of the individual matter,
and that tragic occurrences deserve to be celebrated in immortal verse. But
the modern man, when misfortune assails him, is conscious of himself as a unit
in a statistical total; the past and the future stretch before him in a dreary
procession of trivial defeats. Man himself appears as a somewhat ridiculous
strutting animal, shouting and fussing during a brief interlude between infinite
silences. `Unacommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal,'
says King Lear, and the idea drives him to madness because it is unfamiliar.
But to the modern man the idea is familiar and drives him only to triviality.
Truth. - In old days truth was absolute,
eternal and superhuman. Myself when young accepted this view and devoted a misspent
youth to the search for truth. But a whole host of enemies have arisen to slay
truth: pragmatism, behaviorism, psychologism, relativity-physics. Galileo and
the Inquisition disagreed as to whether the earth went round the sun or the
sun went round the earth. Both agreed in thinking that there was a great difference
between these two opinions. The point on which they agreed was the one on which
they were both mistaken: the difference is only one of words. In old days it
was possible to worship truth; indeed the sincerity of the worship was demonstrated
by the practice of human sacrifice. But it is difficult to worship a merely
human and relative truth. The law of gravitation, according to Eddington, is
only a convenient convention of measurement. It is not truer than other views,
any more than the metric system is truer than feet and yards.
Nature and Nature's law lay hid in night;
God said, `Let Newton be,; and measurement was facilitated.
This sentiment seems lacking in sublimity.
When Spinoza believed anything, he considered that he was enjoying the intellectual
love of God. The modern man believes with Marx that he is swayed by economic motives,
or with Freud that some sexual motive underlies his belief in the exponential
theorem or in the distribution of fauna in the Red Sea. In neither case can he
enjoy Spinoza's exaltation.
So far we have been considering modern
cynicism in a rationalistic manner, as something that has intellectual causes.
Belief, however, as modern psychologists never weary of telling us, is seldom
determined by rational motives, and the same is true of disbelief, though sceptics
often overlook this fact. The causes of any widespread scepticism are likely
to be sociological rather than intellectual. The main cause is always comfort
without power. The holders of power are not cynical, since they are able to
enforce their ideals. Victims of oppression are not cynical, since they are
filled with hate, and hate, like any other strong passion, brings with it a
train of attendant beliefs. Until the advent of education, democracy, and mass
production, intellectuals had everywhere a considerable influence upon the march
of affairs, which was by no means diminished if their heads were cut off. The
modern intellectual finds himself in a quite different situation. It is by no
means difficult for him to obtain a fat job and a good income provided he is
willing to sell his services to the stupid rich either as propagandist or as
Court jester. The effect of mass production and elementary education is that
stupidity is more firmly entrenched than at any other time since the rise of
civilization. When the Czarist Government killed Lenin's brother, it did not
turn Lenin into a cynic, since hatred inspired a lifelong activity in which
he was finally successful. But in the more solid countries of the West there
is seldom such potent cause for hatred, or such opportunity for spectacular
revenge. The work of intellectuals is ordered and paid for by Governments or
rich men, whose aims probably seem absurd, if not pernicious, to the intellectuals
concerned. But a dash of cynicism enables them to adjust their consciences to
the situation. There are, it is true, some activities in which wholly admirable
work is desired by the powers that be; the chief of these is science, and the
next is public architecture in America. But if a man's education has been literary,
as is still too often the case, he finds himself at the age of twenty-two with
a considerable skill that he cannot exercise in any manner that appear important
to himself. Men of science are not cynical even in the West, because they can
exercise their best brains with the full approval of the community; but in this
they are exceptionally fortunate among modern intellectuals.
If this diagnosis is right, modern cynicism
cannot be cured merely by preaching, or by putting better ideals before the
young than those that their pastors and masters fish out from the rusty armory
of outworn superstitions. The cure will only come when intellectuals can find
a career that embodies their creative impulses. I do not see any prescription
except the old one advocated by Disraeli: `Educate our masters.' But it will
have to be a more real education than is commonly given at the present day to
either proletarians or plutocrats, and it will have to be an education taking
some account of real cultural values and not only of the utilitarian desire
to produce so many goods that nobody have time to enjoy them. A man is not allowed
to practise medicine unless he knows something of the human body, but a financier
is allowed to operate freely without any knowledge at all of the multifarious
effects of his activities, with the sole exception of the effect upon his bank
account. How pleasant a world would be in which no man was allowed to operate
on the Stock Exchange unless he could pass an examination in economics and Greek
poetry, and in which politicians were obliged to have a competent knowledge
of history and modern novels! Imagine a magnate confronted with the question:
`If you were to make a corner in wheat, what effect would this have upon German
poetry?' Causation in the modern world is more complex and remote in its ramifications
than it ever was before, owing to the increase in large organizations; but those
who control these organizations are ignorant men who do not know the hundredth
part of the consequences of their actions. Rabelais published his book anonymously
for fear of losing his University post. A modern Rabelais would never write
the book, because he would be aware that his anonymity would be penetrated by
the perfected methods of publicity. The rulers of the world have always been
stupid, but they have not in the past been so powerful as they are now. It is
therefore more important than it used to be to find some way of securing that
they shall be intelligent. Is this problem insoluble? I do not think so, but
I should be the last to maintain that it is easy.
On
Denoting (1905)
Vagueness (1923)
Icarus
or The Future of Science (1924)
What is an Agnostic
Knowledge and
Wisdom
Why I am
not a Christian (06.03.1927)
In
Praise of Idleness (1932)
Of Co-Operation
(18.05.1932)
On Sales Resistance
(22.06.1932)
On Modern
Uncertainty (20.07.1932)
What is the Soul?
(28.09.1932)
On youthful
Cynism (1930)
Philosophical
Consequences of Relativity (1626)
On Astrologers
How
to become a Man of Genius
Education
and Disciple
What
Desires are politically important? (Speech at the Nobel Award, 11.12.1950)
Prolog to his Autobiography: What
I have lived for