which has been affected by science, and that part, nearer to man and
man’s institutions, which has yet for the greater part to be conquered.
While the physical equipment of New York compares with that of fourth
century Athens as Athens itself would compare with an Aurignacian cave,
the life of men in the city is perhaps more disordered and futile and
incomplete than the author of the Republic found it. The moral of
this contrast need hardly be pointed in so many words. The idolum of
science is incomplete; for it chiefly touches life in its physical
sector; and it remains to complete the span so that every activity and
condition may be described, measured, and grasped in scientific terms.
With the vast modern improvement in our physical arrangements in view,
it must occur to almost anyone that a permanent advance in social
life depends upon a much more thorough and realistic acquaintance with
the facts than the social sciences have yet been able to provide.
Before an army moves over the land it is well for it to have moved in
someone’s mind over a topographic map. Lacking such maps, all our day
to day improvements have been wasteful sallies into eutopia, proceeding
without order, without a sufficient equipment, and without any general
plan.
3
There is a point up to which each science may well be left to cultivate
its field for its own sake, without any regard for the fruits. Mr.
Thorstein Veblen, in The Place of Science in Civilization, has well
pointed out the way in which science arises out of idle curiosity;
and science, studied and advanced for its own sake, is surely one of
the great playthings of the race. In this aspect, while science seeks
a quite different path to the contemplative life than art takes, its
end is the same--the dominant interest is an esthetic one, the joy of
pure perception. Science is thus a sort of world in itself, and it is
self-sufficient: there is no need for it to make contact with the real
world in which we fight and love and earn our daily bread. In its own
world, science is no better and no worse than theosophy or astrology or
fables about deity.
But the divorce of science from the daily life of the community is not
altogether an advantage. If it fosters a whole-hearted cultivation
of science for its own values, it tends to lose sight of realities
without which its values are meaningless. It is hard perhaps to locate
the point at which science, divorced from every day realities, ceases
to have any social relevance; but it seems to me that such a point
exists; and when the sciences remain disparate and unrelated one to
the other, they tend to pass over from a public world to the private
world of the specialist; and the knowledge which obtains in that world
can with difficulty be brought out again to irrigate the common life
of the community; or if it is brought out, as bacteriology is brought
out in relation to the treatment of disease, it is divorced from a
consideration of the total situation in a way that makes so many
specialist advances in medicine, for example, the stamping ground for
the fanatic.
This loss of contact, I believe, is highly dangerous; for it lessens
the effect of scientific discipline upon daily affairs quite as much as
a cloistered religion, by erecting impossible sanctions, opens the way
for much unalloyed slackness and baseness, and by demanding that Pistol
and Falstaff live like Christ prevents these biological rapscallions
from achieving so much as the level of Robin Hood. The upshot of this
dissociation of science and social life is that superstition takes
the place of science among the common run of men, as a more easily
apprehended version of reality.
Today the whole corpus of knowledge is in an anarchic state, and it
lacks order precisely because it lacks any definite relations to
the community which creates it, and for which it, in turn, provides
the spectacles through which the world is seen. Against the gains
that have come from the increasing specialization of the sciences,
we have to set off the losses which the community suffers from the
development of crude forms of science, and from quackeries like
astrology and spiritualism which succeed in giving a complete account
of man’s place in the universe in terms that are fairly intelligible
to the lay mind. It seems to me, then, that in the cultivation of the
sciences a definite hierarchy of values must be established which
shall have some relation to the essential needs of the community. The
independence of science from human values is a gross superstition:
the desire for order, for security, for esthetically satisfactory
patterns--along with the desire for fame or the favor of princes--have
all played their parts in the development of science. Though the logic
of science may discount the human factor as far as possible in its
internal operations, it is because men have placed a certain value upon
disinterested intellectual operations that these activities are pursued
in modern communities to the exclusion of other interests and claims.
Let us put the problem concretely. A community which cultivates
chemical science to the point at which it is able to wipe out a whole
city by a few explosions of poisonous gas is in a pretty treacherous
situation. If the science that it possesses has not helped to found a
eutopia, it has at any rate provided the foundations for a kakotopia,
or bad place: in short, for a hell. Indeed scientific knowledge has
not merely heightened the possibilities of life in the modern world:
it has lowered the depths. When science is not touched by a sense of
values it works--as it fairly consistently has worked during the past
century--towards a complete dehumanization of the social order. The
plea that each of the sciences must be permitted to go its own way
without control should be immediately rebutted by pointing out that
they obviously need a little guidance when their applications in war
and industry are so plainly disastrous.
We must be prepared to recognize that “truths” do not stand together
on a high and lofty pedestal: some are important and some are trivial,
some are innocent and some are dangerous, and while the pursuit of
truth is a good in itself--_and complete freedom in that pursuit
is a_ sine qua non _of a good social life_--certain departments of
investigation may need to be offset and corrected by work in other
fields. In a modern Western European community, a sociological insight
into the causes and conditions of war and peace is a needed corrective
to the crudities of applied physical science and without such
correction the mere increase of scientific knowledge, of which we boast
so vacuously, may be highly inimical to the practice of the good life
in the community.
4
If the sciences are to be cultivated anew with respect for a definite
hierarchy of human values, it seems to me that the sciences must be
focussed again upon particular local communities, and the problems
which they offer for solution. Just as geometry in Egypt arose out of
the need for annually surveying the boundaries that the Nile wiped
out, and as astronomy developed in Chaldea in order to determine the
shift of the seasons for the planting of crops, as geology in modern
times developed out of the questions that a practical stone mason, like
Hugh Miller, found himself confronted with--so may the sciences which
are today incomplete and partial develop along the necessary lines
by a survey of existing conditions and intellectual resources in a
particular community.
On one hand, science must be in contact with the whole idolum of
scientific thought--with that vast overworld of scientific effort which
is the product of no single place or people or time. On the other
hand, it must be related to the definite local community, limited in
time and in space, in which its researches and its speculations will
be realized and applied. Out of these surveys of existing conditions
we should find, I believe, that in social psychology, in anthropology,
in economics there are a vast number of facts and relations which
remain to be described; and that, similarly, certain departments
like craniology and jurisprudence and folklore have been vastly
overcultivated in proportion to any genuine importance that their
researches may have upon our control over the community’s development.
Such an investigation would bring out, above all, the weakness of
contemporary sociological thought, with its diabetic flatulence of
special sociologies, and its lack of any general agreement as to the
field which is to be cultivated.
Apart from its great function as a plaything, science is valuable
only to the extent that its researches can be brought to bear upon
the conditions in a particular community, in a definite region. The
difference between science as a plaything and science as an instrument
for enabling us to establish more effective relations with other men
and with the rest of our environment, is the difference between firing
a shot at a target and firing at a buck for provender. The practice
one gets in firing at a target is great fun, and incidentally it
improves one’s marksmanship; such idle sport is perhaps one of the
stigmata of a civilized community. Nevertheless, unless one’s skill
can be definitely brought home it remains a personal achievement; and
the community as a whole is not a pound of meat the better for it. If
science is to play the significant part that Bacon and Andreæ and Plato
and the other great humanists desired it to, it must be definitely
brought home and realized in our here and now.
The need for this humanization of science has already been perceived in
Great Britain. During the last decade a movement has gathered headway
in the schools and extended itself to associations outside the schools.
The title of this movement is “Regional Survey,” and its point of
origin is, I believe, the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh which was well
described more than two decades ago as the “world’s first sociological
laboratory.”
The aim of the Regional Survey is to take a geographic region and
explore it in every aspect. It differs from the social survey with
which we are acquainted in America in that it is not chiefly a survey
of evils; it is, rather, a survey of the existing conditions in all
their aspects; and it emphasizes to a much greater extent than the
social survey the natural characteristics of the environment, as they
are discovered by the geologist, the zoologist, the ecologist--in
addition to the development of natural and human conditions in the
historic past, as presented by the anthropologist, the archæologist,
and the historian. In short, the regional survey attempts a local
synthesis of all the specialist “knowledges.”
Such a survey has been conducted in the Southeastern counties of
England under the auspices of various local scientific societies;
and the result of it is a complete description of the community’s
foundations, its past, its manner of working and living, its
institutions, its regional peculiarities, and its utilization of
physical, vital, and social resources. Each of the sciences draws
upon its general body of knowledge to illuminate the points under
observation; and when problems arise which point definitely to the
lack of scientific or scholarly data, new trails are opened and new
territory defined.
In looking at the community through the Regional Survey, the
investigator is dealing with a real thing and not with an arbitrary
idolum. In so far as the local community has certain elements in common
with similar regions in other countries, or has absorbed elements from
other civilizations, these things will be given their full value,
instead of being disregarded because they weaken the identity of the
local community with that precious myth, the National State. The
greater part of the data that is thus brought to light may be plotted
on a map, graphically presented in a chart, or photographed. In Saffron
Walden, England, there is an admirable little museum devoted to such
an exhibition of its region; and in the Outlook Tower, at Edinburgh,
there used to be a library and an apparatus of exhibition by which one
could begin at the point where one was standing and work outwards, in
thought, to embrace the whole wide world. Knowledge that is presented
in this fashion is available so that whoever runs may read; it has
every feature, therefore, of popular science as it is purveyed in the
cheap newspaper and magazine, whilst it remains real science and is not
presented as something that verges from a miracle to a superstition.
The knowledge embodied in the Regional Survey has a coherence and
pithiness which no isolated study of science can possibly possess. It
is presented in such a form that it can be assimilated by every member
of the community who has the rudiments of an education, and it thus
differs from the isolated discipline which necessarily remains the
heritage of the specialist. Above all, this knowledge is not that of
“subjects,” taken as so many water tight and unrelated compartments:
it is a knowledge of a whole region, seen in all its aspects; so that
the relations between the work aspect and the soil aspect, between the
play aspect and the work aspect, become fairly simple and intelligible.
This common tissue of definite, verifiable, localized knowledge is what
all our partisan utopias and reconstruction programs have lacked; and
lacking it, have been one-sided and ignorant and abstract--devising
paper programs for the reconstruction of a paper world.
Regional survey, then, is the bridge by which the specialist whose face
is turned towards the library and the laboratory, and the active worker
in the field, whose face is turned towards the city and region in which
he lives, may come into contact; and out of this contact our plans and
our eutopias may be founded on such a permanent foundation of facts
as the scientist can build for us, while the sciences themselves will
be cultivated with some regard for the human values and standards, as
embodied in the needs and the ideals of the local community. This is
the first step out of the present impasse: we must return to the real
world, and face it, and survey it in its complicated totality. Our
castles-in-air must have their foundations in solid ground.
5
The needed reorientation of science is important; but by itself it is
not enough. Knowledge is a tool rather than a motor; and if we know
the world without being able to react upon it, we are guilty of that
aimless pragmatism which consists of devising all sorts of ingenious
machines and being quite incapable of subordinating them to any
coherent and attractive pattern.
Now, men are moved by their instinctive impulses and by such
emotionally colored pattern-ideas or idola as the dreamer is capable
of projecting. When we create these pattern-ideas, we enlarge the
environment, so that our behavior is guided by the conditions which we
seek to establish and enjoy in an imaginary world. However crude the
Marxian analysis of society may have been, it at least had the merit of
presenting a great dream--the dream of a titanic struggle between the
possessors and the dispossessed in which every worker had a definite
part to play. Without these dreams, the advances in social science
will be just as disorderly and fusty as the applications of physical
science have been in our material affairs, where in the absence of any
genuine scale of values, a patent collar button is regarded as equally
important as a tungsten filament if the button happens to bring the
inventor as great a financial reward.
6
Up to about the middle of the seventeenth century, before modern
physical science had rigorously defined its field, the breach between
literature and science, which Aristotle had made, was not altogether
complete; and while the humanist ideal was intact both literature and
science were regarded as coeval phases of man’s intellectual activity.
The two dominating figures of the Renascence, Leonardo da Vinci and
Michael Angelo, were artists, technicians, and men of science; and in
a comparison between a translation of Michael Angelo’s sonnets and a
photograph of St. Peter’s the sonnets come off rather well.
The great contribution of the Renascence was the ideal of fully
energized human beings, able to span life in all its manifestations,
as artists, scientists, technicians, philosophers, and what not. This
ideal exercised a powerful influence on lesser figures, like the
Admirable Crichton and Sir Walter Raleigh, and even down to the time
of Descartes it contributed to that exuberance of the intellectual
life which was the Renascence at its best. When John Amos Comenius
wrote his remarkable little book called The Labyrinth of the World
and the Paradise of the Heart in 1623, he combined the outlooks of
science and art in a remarkable synthesis; for the first part of this
work is a picturesque survey of the actual world as Comenius found
it, and the second a picture of the transition to the heavenly world
promised in the Christian religion. The idea behind Comenius’ Labyrinth
was the same that inspired Andreæ; and were it not for the complete
otherworldliness of this theological utopia, the Paradise of the Heart,
Comenius’ discourse would take a high place in the history of utopian
thought.
There is no genuine logical basis, as far as I can see, in the
dissociation of science and art, of knowing and dreaming, of
intellectual activities and emotional activities. The division between
the two is simply one of convenience; for both these activities are
simply different modes in which human beings create order out of the
chaos in which they find themselves. Such is the humanist view. As an
instance of this, when the Royal Society was projected in England in
the middle of the seventeenth century, Johann Andreæ advised his friend
Samuel Hartlib, then in London, not to neglect the humanities while
furthering the pursuit of the physical sciences. Unfortunately, the men
who gathered together to form the Royal Society were specialists in
physical science; and in the lapse of the humanist tradition through
the religious acerbities of the time, they had lost some of their
desire for a complete life. As a result, the original charter of the
society confined its work to the physical sciences.
Insignificant as it now appears in the annals of science, this decision
seems to me to mark a definite turning point in human thought.
Henceforth the scientist was to be one sort of person and the artist
another; henceforth the idolum of science and the idolum of art were
not to be cemented together in a single personality; henceforth, in
fact, the dehumanization of art and science begins. It is interesting
to note that with the divorce of the humanities from science, art and
science entered upon separate careers which, for all their diversities,
are curiously similar. Both art and science, for example, ceased to be
the common property of the community; and each of them split up into a
multiplying host of specialisms. In this process, art and science made
many notable advances; so that this period is usually spoken of as a
period of enlightenment or progress; but the result on the community
was what we discovered in our examination of Coketown and the Country
House.
7
We must now consider the development of the arts in the modern
community. At the height of the Middle Age, as in fifth century Athens,
the arts formed together a living unity. A citizen did not go into
a concert hall to hear music, to a church to say his prayers, to a
theatre to see a play, to a picture gallery to view pictures: it was
a mean town, indeed, that could not boast a cathedral and a couple of
churches; and in these buildings, drama and music and architecture and
painting and sculpture were united for the purpose of ringing changes
on the emotional nature of men and converting them to accept the
theological vision of otherworldly utopia.
The splitting up of these arts into a number of separate boxes was
part of that movement towards individualism and protestantism whose
effects most people are familiar with in the field of religion alone.
Henceforward, music, drama, painting, and the other arts developed
largely in isolation; and each of them was forced to build up a
separate world. The greater part of the gains that were made in these
worlds was not carried over into the community at large, but remained
the possession of the artists themselves or their private patrons and
critics in the Country House. With such exceptions as the Italian and
Japanese woodcuts of the eighteenth century, and the few survivals
of ballad and drama that slipt over from the Middle Age, popular art
became another name for all that was coarse and stunted and depressed.
The popular architecture of the nineteenth century is the sordid
little redbrick rabbit hutch: popular religion is embodied in the
stunted sheet-iron or brick chapel (as it is called in England) of the
Baptists and Methodists: popular music is the latest barrel organ lilt:
popular painting is the calendar lithograph: and popular literature is
the dime novel.
The divorce of the art of the cultivated classes from that of the whole
community tended to deprive it of any other standards than the artist
himself was content to erect. Here again the comparison with science
is curiously pertinent. The world of art is in a sense a separate
world, and it can be cultivated for a time without reference to the
desires and emotions of the community out of which it has sprung. But
the motto “Art for art’s sake” turns out in practice to be something
quite different--namely, art for the artist’s sake; and art which is
produced in this manner, without any external standard of performance,
is frequently just an instrument for overcoming a neurosis or enabling
the artist to restore his personal equilibrium. Divorced from his
community, the artist was driven back upon himself: instead of seeking
to create a beauty which all men might share, he devoted himself to
projecting a poignant angle of his personal vision--an angle which I
shall call the picturesque. The cause of this divorce I have already
pointed out in the chapter on the Country House; it is with the effects
of this divorce, for which the artist was not greatly to blame, that we
are here concerned.
This conflict between “beauty” and the “picturesque” is perhaps common
to all the arts, and with sufficient factual detail I might be able to
trace its effects on literature and music. For the sake of clearness
and simplicity I shall confine myself to painting and sculpture, with
the proviso that our conclusions will apply, by and large, to the whole
field.
Let me emphasize, before going any further, that I am using the terms
“beauty” and the “picturesque” in quite different senses from the vague
ones that are usually attached to them; and that I use them without
any preliminary judgment as to their place and value in the good life.
The picturesque, in the quite arbitrary sense in which the word is
used here, is an abstract quality of vision, sound, or meaning which
creates what we might call pure esthetic experience. In painting, the
picturesque probably arose with the discovery, on the part of the
leisured classes in the Country House, that it was possible to achieve
rapture, a sort of esthetic trance, a complete state of beatitude, by
the more or less prolonged contemplation of a pictorial subject. Up to
the time of this discovery, painting was simply a branch of interior
decoration; the great paintings of the Christian World served, for the
public, as illustrations to that outline of history which mediæval
theology provided: they had a habitat, a social destination.