From Plato to Irving Babbitt humanists have been occupied with
the idea of leadership, since men are social beings, unhappy and
self-destructive in mutual hostility, happiest and greatest when
co-operating in community in the wisest available ideas. Whose ideas?
Plato proposed the leadership of philosophers. But he himself did all
that a philosopher can do. He was of the greatest; in one of the high
masterpieces of human thought he proposed a scheme for the salvation
of Greece--and while he wrote and Athens read, Greek civilisation
declined. Something had departed that but an age before had made of
Athens the supreme exemplar of what human existence may come to at its
best, in zest of life and ardour of co-operation, in brilliance and
profundity of thought, something that had created a society more lovely
than any other in recorded history, and produced a literature and a
full free current of ideas that are still the model and despair of all
our aspirations.
May this loss have been loss of disciplined community at the basis of
all thought? Each man thinks not what he will but what he can with
the articulate particles of his consciousness. Only by community here
can one mind think the same thoughts as another. In such community
minds will hold their common ideas with heightened ardour, as in
friendship a common thought rises to new vitality by being shared in
utter comprehension. It was not an accident that friendship played so
profound a part in Greek life, not an accident that thought and letters
so flourished. For expression had met understanding, and understanding
had enriched the common premisses of thought. One among them, at all
events, made the association.
“Not long afterwards,” says Thucydides, “nearly the whole Hellenic
world was in commotion. When trouble had once begun in the cities,
those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and
further.... _The meanings of words had no longer the same relations to
things_....” And he goes on to detail wherein the confused meanings
of terms unsettled the mutual comprehension upon which the harmony of
civilised life depends.
As for us, we are in something of a like predicament. The most striking
aspect of contemporary life is the contrast between the fruitfulness
of the scientific world, its vitality, its harmony, its world-wide
co-operation, and our frankly acknowledged moral bankruptcy--vigour
and fecundity in the area to which discipline has been shifted,
and futility and chaos in the area from which discipline has been
withdrawn. It is not that men have ceased to be concerned with moral
choice. So long as they pursue on reflection what seems to be good, so
long are they exercising their moral nature. Never, I dare say, has
there been a wilder play of reflection on what seems to be good.
If we are suffering a moral chaos it is not from the abandonment of
morals but from a helpless discrepancy, an incapacity to think the same
thoughts. Given another Plato, our only chance of accord under his
leadership would be such community with him and with each other in the
articulate elements of his utterance as would evoke the same living
thoughts in our various minds.
The task of creating such community is a subtle one, immeasurably more
difficult than the corresponding task of modernism. The particles of
consciousness with which we think here are quick with feeling--with
sentiment, impulse, passion, and desire, drawn in each individual from
his own native depths. They are neither such sheer conventions as the
units of measure that make up the syntax of scientific thought, nor
objective and tangible like the data of nature with which science
deals. They are the dynamic forces of life itself, spontaneous and
imperious, and they impel us whether or no. Whether they are to drive
us in anarchy or in harmony, however, depends upon our ability so to
channelise them, so to articulate and identify them for thought, as to
bring us into mutual understanding of those ideas in which they play a
part. The first service of the humanistic discipline was that it put
the individual mind into intimate contact with the tradition of humane
letters in which were embodied and shaped the articulate elements
of such ideas. It was the second and no less significant service of
this discipline that in clinging sedulously to the great tradition
of that literature it tended to give to all minds thus imbued _the
same_ elements filled with _the same_ substance, and so put mind into
community with mind. In abandoning the common discipline of this area
of the consciousness modernism has not only done something to dilute
our powers of thought there, but has left us, mind and mind, out of
community and in a moral confusion that lies, not in the open conflict
of ideas, but in tacit disparities of idea that never meet.
Modernism reaches its ultimate goal in a knowledge of nature. But
nature has no need of our knowledge. It is _we_ who need it, for our
own ends. In the measure in which, for the conception of those ends, we
lose our powers of thought, so precariously wrought in the long travail
of the past, and so dependent upon unremitting reconquest, we shall in
fact have killed the goose that lays the golden egg.
_Courage and Education_[74]