The Road Ahead

by SIR RICHARD LIVINGSTONE

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IT is our lot to live in one of the most important and difficult epochs of the world. This will seem good or bad fortune according to our temperament. We cannot expect to have easy, untroubled minds; we cannot count on enjoying the comfort which so many of us have always been accustomed to expect; though it should be remembered that such comfort has never been, and is not now, the lot of the mass of mankind. But there are compensations.

They give opportunities for the great virtues, which easy ages do not give — for courage, public spirit, endurance, a tenacious hold on worthy aims, a persistent pursuit of them in spite of disappointment, frustration, and even defeat. We all profess to believe in these virtues and do, no doubt, honestly believe in them. Certainly both Britain and the United States showed them during the late war. But now we are called to show them in far more difficult times than war, in times of peace, when we tire of a strain which is less violent but more prolonged, when there are no trumpet calls or instant challenges to keep our temper at its keenest, when the imagination flags.

Our difficulties arise in part from gifts of science — the internal-combustion engine, the atom bomb and other weapons of widespread and catastrophic destruction. Virgil’s phrase scelerata insania belli, “the criminal madness of war,” has always been true, but since 1920, and still more since 1945, war has taken on a new aspect. We are children into whose hands kind Aunt Science almost unconsciously, while she was thinking of other things, has put much more dangerous weapons than razors; and our tempers are not always in control and our heads not always clear. That perhaps is the immediate cause of our difficulties, an incidental and accidental result of our knowing more, of what we call the advance of science.

And then science has affected the world in another and more serious way by upsetting people’s minds. It is not the first time in history that this has happened. There is a close parallel in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., when science was born and the speculations of Ionian Greeks and their successors first destroyed existing views of the physical universe, and then, spreading to politics, religion, and morals, there too caused confusion and doubt, which pervaded the intellectual atmosphere till Plato brought order into the spiritual chaos of his day, and laid a firm basis for a philosophy of life which, in various forms and with many modifications, served the ancient world for eight hundred years and then was taken up into the framework of Christian theology. The same thing has happened to us, since in the seventeenth century science came out of a long eclipse, and, as its light fell on one province of life after another, traditional ways of thought and accepted beliefs were troubled. But our Plato has not yet appeared.

There art’ other causes of our difficulties. This is one of the great ages of social change — perhaps the greatest of all. It might have come, as it has long been coming in England, gradually and peacefully. But it broke out in Russia with the violence of a volcanic eruption and every country fell the tremors of the shock. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the French Revolution of 1789 have much in common. Both overthrew a corrupt tyranny. Both began with noble aims and drew strength from them— in the older revolution, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality; in the later one, Social Justice and the Rights of the Common Man. In both the radiant sun of their dawn set in storm. But both revolutions left on the world a mark that nothing will efface, and were the heralds of social changes.

None of these difficulties need discourage us. Our problems are not insoluble. Social change is nothing new, and it should be a peaceful evolution. We can learn to use the discoveries of science wisely. As for the spiritual confusion caused by its impact on our ways of thinking, there are signs that we are absorbing this potent and disturbing force into our system. What used to be called the conflict between religion and science is dying down and, as in wars of a different kind, a quarrel that reasonable men might have avoided seems likely to end in a readjustment of territory, and in agreement between the two parties not to interfere with each other’s private concerns.

Still it is not an easy age. How thankful we should be if a leader appeared to show the path to the Promised Land of our hopes! The world needs such a man today. He is certain to come sooner or later. But his coming may be deferred, and we can’t sit idle in the hope of his appearing. Besides, his advent depends partly on us. The mere fact that a leader is needed does not guarantee his appearance. People must be ready for him and in their modest way prepare for him. Roosevelt and Churchill could have done nothing if they had not found in America and Britain nations ready to follow them. If the British people in 1939 had all been pacifists or communists, a hundred Churchills would have been powerless. So now, in the present emergency and need, it is our duty to meet it so far as we can, to the best of our powers, and to push hard with our individual strengths at the door we wish to open.

What do I mean by pushing? Different people will answer that difficult question in different ways and we cannot expect agreement in detail. But there is one thing on which we can all agree. If you are pushing at a door, the first thing is to get into the attitude in which you can make the best use of your strength, whatever that may be.

That is true of all problems. If you find yourself facing anything, you must take up the right attitude to it in order to face it effectively. If a man loses a fortune — or gets one; if he goes blind or gets paralyzed, or has a leg amputated; if he marries, if he has children, he finds himself in a new position, and he ought to think about it, adjust himself to it, prepare to deal with it.

How shall we adjust ourselves to the world in which we have to live? And what is the right attitude to it? My first suggestion is that we have clear in our minds what life is like; and one means to this end is to read history, which is a record of life. But history is one of the most misleading things in the world if we read it in textbooks that cover large periods in a few hundred pages. Textbooks, small-scale histories, give the results but not the long, tedious, and doubtful struggles that produced the results. We see the last scene of the play but miss all the scenes that led up to the happy marriages or tragic disaster at the end. Everything seems easy in them; the difficulties are smoothed out; one wonders what all the bother was about, why so many mistakes were made, why the statesmen were such fools.

But read history on a large scale, following the events month by month and sometimes day by day, and a very different picture appears. The actors in history can’t foresee the future; unlike the historian, who knows the result of the game, they merely see the cards in their hands at the moment and are not at all sure about them. Can they carry the public with them? If they take a certain step, will they alienate their supporters? Some of their friends are wavering, some untrustworthy; what risks can they afford? What will be the long-term results of a certain line of policy?

That is the atmosphere in which history is made. That is the atmosphere in which statesmen have to work — President Truman and Mr. Marshall, Mr. Attlee and Mr. Bevin. That is the atmosphere in which statesmen have always worked. Put yourself back into Lincoln’s position before the Civil War when it was a question whether to compromise with the South, or again in 1862 when he had to decide whether he should remove McClellan or not. To us, knowing what happened, it seems fairly plain sailing. To Lincoln through those weary years it was a voyage over a stormy sea, with land never in sight, and shipwreck possible at any moment. That is what the world is like. One lesson of history is that, in great and important ages, things are never easy for those in responsible positions; and in a democracy all are, in some degree, responsible.

Then, when one problem is solved, another appears. There are no final solutions in human affairs, no Armageddon, no decisive battle which settles everything. There is only a long campaign for a better world, lasting centuries and indeed millennia; and for such campaigns we ought to have shortterm objectives, but very, very long-term views.

I don’t say that it is what we should wish. But my point is that this is one of the conditions on which life is given us and which, unless we wish, and are able, to slink out of it, we have to accept. We must not expect things to be easy, or deceive ourselves with the glib phrases which politicians and others love. Even in a warless world new difficulties, new problems, will arise. Original sin, or if you prefer Emerson’s phrase for it, the drop of black blood in man, will see to that.

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You may feel that I am being rather gloomy. Now let me turn to the bright side of things, and look at another lesson of history, equally true — that there is such a thing as good and that good survives and triumphs, whereas evil fails and perishes. One can believe this without sharing the illusions of the nineteenth century that under the guidance of science mankind was about to enter the Promised Land and live there happily evermore. We can even believe it without believing in progress. I will not argue whether men are better than they were two thousand years ago. Personally I think they are. But whether this is so or not, one thing seems to me certain: good survives and like a slow leaven works in the heavy dough. As an English mystic put it, “Righteousness may be overborne but it is not overcome,”and one of the unmistakable lessons of history is its survival.

Let me give two instances, one from religious and one from secular history. When Christ died on the cross, leaving eleven followers who had all deserted him in the hour of trial, what prospect was there of any future for Him or His teaching? If someone had offered then to bet a million to one against, would we have taken the bet? Perhaps— for amusement. Or think of Socrates four hundred years earlier put to death amid the approval of the majority of his countrymen, and the indifference of the rest, and only regretted by his disciples. Would anyone have thought then that he would be one of the great intellectual and moral forces in history? It would be easy to multiply instances: there is no more familiar phenomenon than the man whose teaching, rejected by his own generation, later becomes a permanent light of the world. No doubt the leaven of good works slowly, very slowly, but nothing destroys it. That is one of the fundamental facts about life, and it is important to have a firm hold on it.

I spoke of the importance of adjusting ourselves to the world and taking the right attitude toward it, and here seem to be the attitudes which history suggests. First, though life has of course many pleasant and easy and light moments, we should abandon any easy optimism about it and realize that we are engaged in a business where we must expect often to fail and to be baffled and disappointed, gaining ground foot by foot. And second, we should refresh and strengthen and fortify ourselves by the vision of good.

If we take this double attitude, if we realize that progress is a slow, difficult business, and il we dwell on the vision of good, we shall be less likely to make the mistakes we made after the First World War. I remember its end well. The omens for the future seemed fair. It had been, we were told, a war to end war, and Shelley’s words described the public’s hopes: —

But the years between 1918 and 1939 were not a great age. Disappointment, disillusionment, set in. The chief weakness was at the top, in the educated classes and the writers. There was a loss of belie! — not only of religious belief but of belief in general. It is a mark of the contemporary literature, and though the importance of novelists and poets ought not to be exaggerated, they do express and shape the outlook of an age. In the literature of 1918-1939 the world did not appear as the scene of “a great age,” but rather as a dusty room, and

We had hoped too much; we believed too little.

Now let me return to the right attitude to life.

I suggested that one element in it was the vision of good, and you may have wondered what I meant. Let me try to explain and develop my point.

The English statesman, John Morley, once said that an educated man knew when a thing was proved, and an uneducated man did not know. A notable definition — clearly it is very important to know when a thing is proved — but an inadequate one. Should we not rather say that an educated man knows what is first-rate and an uneducated man does not, and that the main question to be asked about any system of education is, Does it teach people to discern the first-rate and to get a firm hold on it?

Isn’t that obvious? Doesn’t one want and need to know what is first-rate in as many fields as possible: in art and music and literature; in ways of life — the minister’s, the teacher’s, the doctor’s, the banker’s; in the various fields of industry and commerce; in sport and dress? Are we to be satisfied with the secondand third-rate in any of them? And is it not still more important to have this knowledge in the field of human nature and conduct and there, too, to know what is first-rate? What the world most wants today is to recapture a clear sense of the first-rate, of the difference of good and evil. I had almost said that we need a new Puritanism, but a Puritanism without unlovely features, one which is not negative or self-righteous or censorious — the Puritanism of the young Milton who wrote L’Allegro and Il Penseroso and Comus.

One sees the difficulties; to know good is not the same thing as doing it; as Pascal said, “How far it is from the knowledge to the love of God.” Yet unless one knows what is good, what hope is there of doing it? For not only is the search for the firstrate a natural instinct in man, but it is also practically necessary. We are trying to make a better world. Can it be done unless we have before our eyes a pattern or design of good, after which to remake it?

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How does one get ibis pattern of good? As one gets the knowledge of good in everything. There is only one way to distinguish the first-rate from the inferior, whether in music or art, in banking or engineering, in dress or home decoration or baseball, or anything else: by living with the best, by hearing the best music, seeing the best art, being in a firstrate bank or a first-rate engineering firm, and so on. In that way a feeling for the first-rate is unconsciously developed, an instinctive dislike of the inferior grows up. Equally, the knowledge of good in life comes from living, so far as possible, with what is good in human nature and conduct. Conversely, if we live with the second-rate in music or art our taste will get spoiled. Is not the same true of life?

Contemporary civilization does not help us much. There is of course a great deal of good in it, but the modern world is like a store in which first-rate articles are so jumbled up with shoddy ones (think of our newspapers, films, novels, drama, and all the other ingredients of our current existence) that it is dangerous to shop there, unless one enters the store knowing well how to distinguish the good from the bad. And education does not always help. We expect it to develop mind and body, to teach us to think, to give us the aptitudes and knowledge which will make us at home in the world — all very necessary objects, but, unless interpreted in a much wider sense than is usual, quite inadequate for the deepest purposes of life. We are too apt to think that we are fully equipped if we have sufficient science and economics and sociology and some acquaintance with the forms of our political order. It is not so. These things are not enough. There is something still more indispensable: a sense and grasp of good.

A weakness of Western civilization in the last age was the absence of any vivid sense of the good. It is apparent in the literature of the period. Literature has many uses. It entertains us; it reflects and interprets the moods of the time, and it shapes its thought for good or evil. I cannot feel that the writers of the last forty years gave their age much help here.

They did not do for it what Shelley or Wordsworth, Dickens or Meredith, Carlyle, Ruskin, or Matthew Arnold did for their times. They criticized, derided, denounced, wept; and no doubt there was abundant material for criticism and derision and tears. What they did not do was to show us for our encouragement and inspiration a vision of better things. Of course there are exceptions, such as the last great work of Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty, and much of the work of another great poet, T. S. Eliot; in more recent novelists, there is a different attitude, which I believe marks a turn of the tide from a negative spirit to a positive creative one. And again in Professor Toynbee’s work there is a new spirit — a sense that our task is not to undergo history, but to make it.

But I think that my criticism of the literature of the last generation, taking it as a whole, is not unjust. Review the works of the novelists and dramatists of the day who were best known and most read in my country of Wells and Shaw and Bennett and Aldous Huxley and Galsworthy (strangely supposed by foreigners to give a faithful portrait of English society) — how many heroes have they created? Compare, for instance, Wells with Dickens, with whom he has so much in common. Both were molded out of the ordinary homely English earth and owed nothing to formal education; both had genius; both were savage critics of their times. But how many visions of goodness can you find in Wells to set by those with which the pages of Dickens are bright, and who could say of Wells what Gissing said of Dickens — or anything like it: “He gave form and substance to the ideal of goodness and purity, of honour, justice, mercy, whereby the dim multitudes falteringly seek to direct their steps” ?_

In this, Wells was characteristic of the writers of his time. Is it an unjust criticism of them to say that they gave us many things but very few visions of good ? It was not for want of goodness in the world; but they did not see it or were interested in something else. As the proverb says, Many men meet the gods but few salute them. To the most important thing they were indifferent; the greatest reality they saw dimly, if at all. How strange that this should have been the weakness of an age which prided itself on its realism, on its determination to see life as it is!

In The Prelude Wordsworth describes the despondency into which he was thrown by the later developments of the French Revolution, and how his recovery began when he became

Might it not be said that exactly the opposite is true of most of the writers of the inter-war years, that they were studious more to touch and handle little truths than to see great ones? It is a trait in all human nature against which we should do well to be on our guard.

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I AM not of course suggesting that we should be blind to what is petty or absurd or tragic or evil in life (or in ourselves), that we should take Dr. Pangloss as our model, or say with Pope “Whatever is, is right.”That insipid optimism is the opposite extreme, though perhaps the less disastrous one, and it is not found in great writers or in those who have helped their age. There is none in the Bible, or in Homer or Dante or Shakespeare, or in Dickens and the other Victorians whom I mentioned. They have no illusions about the existence of evil and suffering. But you find in them a balanced view, the sense of evil but also the sense of good, and the conviction that though evil is real, good is the ultimate reality in life, and stronger than its failures, disasters, and tragedies.

In the second part of Faust, Goethe has described the poet under the figure of a man in a tower: —

That is the poet: from his tower he scans the world, and is known not only by the range of his vision, but by his power in all things to discern “the beauty divine.” We too, though without the poet’s range of sight or his power to translate what he sees into words, look out from our lesser watchtowers and see the world. It is indeed a checkered landscape with dull and ugly stretches of country, but if we fail to see the wealth and beauty in it, is not something wrong with our eyes?

So I would suggest that we should fit ourselves for living by the vision of good in all its many forms and fields—in religion, in literature, thought, art, music, and above all in men; and in this last category I include not only the resounding heroisms of history but also the unmarked and unobtrusive good, of which there is so much in the ordinary beings about us. Then we shall know the heights which men reach in thought and action, as well as the depths to which they sink and the humdrum levels on which inevitably most of our existence moves. Then we shall have as the background of our minds great exemplars to point the way of advance and to refresh and strengthen us in the hours of doubt and discouragement, disappointment and failure, which come to all. Your nation is called — who can doubt it? — to a great mission in history. Will it be equipped for that mission if the vision of good is not clear and fixed in its mind?

And that vision will be the basis of another element in the mood in which, I suggest, we should face the world of today and tomorrow. It is described and illustrated from history in the chapter on faith in the Epistle to the Hebrews. That chapter seems to me to give the right attitude to life, the one which we need. The author begins by defining faith. He doesn’t mean by it belief in any theological dogmas — not that he would have wished to deny their importance — but a temper and habit of mind. He calls faith “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” That sounds obscure. I think he means that you begin by hoping something, and that when you see it as something more than a hope, as something real, and begin to act on it, hope turns into faith. Hope is indefinite, unsubstantial: act on it and it becomes solid, substantial; it begins to be effective. That is faith.

Imagine a man who wishes to climb a virgin snowpeak. He studies it through binoculars and decides that he will cross that glacier and strike that ridge and follow it and so reach the summit. This planning is hope. It turns to faith when he acts on his plan and sets out on his journey. Then his plans, which have hitherto been hopes, dreams of his mind, acquire solidity and become “the substance of things hoped for.” There is still no certainty that he will reach the top, but his climb as it proceeds illustrates the other aspect of faith, “the evidence of things not seen”: action tests and reveals the truth of his plan. Of course he may be wrong. There is no absolute certainty in life. But if he never turns hope into faith, the mountain will never be climbed; and if his first plan turns out wrong, the experience he gets by trying it brings nearer the ultimate conquest of the peak.

We see more clearly what the writer of the Epistle meant by faith when we turn to his instances of it. The men whom he gives as examples of faith had no certainty of success. They were venturers who acted on conviction against probability. Abraham, the Epistle says, when he left his home in Mesopotamia to find the Promised Land, “went out, not knowing whither he went.” He thought that he was ordered to sacrifice his only son, his one hope of founding a family, and he was prepared to do it.

Many of these venturers achieved great results. Through faith they “subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.” But many never saw the reward of their efforts, the result of their venture, “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”

Without faith nothing is done or ever can be done. Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, to take a few famous names, are perfect examples of it. Could you not use the very words of the Epistle about each of them, and say that “when he was called, he went out, not knowing whither he went" And could you not say of many thousands in our two countries who fell before victory was won, “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar”?

It is for us to take their examples to heart and live by their spirit. “Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight, and run with patience the race that is set before us.