The answer to the second question is much easier. The human race has
continued to progress in its culture, in its knowledge, in its power
over nature, because it has devised institutions which have created
for it a continuous social memory that defies death. Now, as ever, the
wisest and the best must die, while their place is taken by babies
born as ignorant and void of knowledge as in the beginning. Only there
has been invented apparatus which relieves the civilized baby of his
hereditary ignorance, and renders him potentially the heir to all the
wisdom of the ages.
In the first place, _Language_ not only extends enormously the
possibilities of co-operation and common action, but also renders
possible the consolidation of customs and their preservation by oral
tradition. In the next place, _Writing_ enables a society to record
all that it considers worth remembering. Upon these two inventions may
be reared vast intricate structures, religious, political, social,
and scientific, which knit together and dominate human societies from
generation to generation, and create the conditions for an almost
mechanical accumulation of knowledge.
Man has thereby become an educable creature and fallen a victim to the
arts of the examiner. Provided the mechanisms of education do not get
out of gear, it is hard to set limits to the amounts of knowledge with
which he can be crammed; but it is clear that they are far greater
than he could ever have acquired in a lifetime for himself. And as
education (of sorts) has now become world wide, it might seem that the
future of knowledge was now assured, and no longer liable to setbacks
such as those due to the famous burning of the library of Alexandria
at the command of the Caliph Omar, or the extinction of the only Greek
scientists who seriously concerned themselves with the applications of
science to life, of Archimedes and his School, in the sack of Syracuse.
At any rate, it seemed clear that progress in knowledge could continue
indefinitely, even in an otherwise stationary or decadent society.
Whoever argued thus would fail to make sufficient allowance for the
perversity of human nature. Human institutions, like the human body,
are ever tending to get clogged with the waste products of their
own working. Hence, so far from performing the functions for which
they were intended, they are constantly becoming the most formidable
instruments for their frustration. Experience shows how easily Churches
become the most effective deadeners of religious zeal, how often Law
becomes the negation of justice, how deadly is the School to the inborn
craving for knowledge which seemed to Aristotle so characteristic of
man’s nature.
Accordingly, no one familiar with the actual working of academic
institutions is likely to fall into the error of pinning his faith to
them. They are, of course, designed for the purpose of preserving and
promoting the highest and most advanced knowledge hitherto attained:
but do they anywhere fulfil this purpose? Its execution must of
necessity be left to professors not exempt from human frailty, always
selected by more or less defective methods, whose interests by no
means coincide with those of their subjects. The interest of the
subject is to become more widely understood and so more influential.
The interest of the professor is to become more unassailable, and so
more authoritative. He achieves this by becoming more technical. For
the more technical he gets, the fewer can comprehend him; the fewer
are competent to criticize him, the more of an oracle he becomes; if,
therefore, he wishes for an easy life of undisturbed academic leisure,
the more he will indulge his natural tendency to grow more technical as
his knowledge grows, the more he will turn away from those aspects of
his subject which have any direct practical or human interest. He will
wrap himself in mysteries of technical jargon, and become as nearly
as possible unintelligible. Truly, as William James once exclaimed to
me, apropos of the policy of certain philosophers, “the natural enemy
of any subject is the professor thereof!” It is clear that if these
tendencies are allowed to prevail, every subject must in course of time
become unteachable, and not worth learning.
Thus educational systems become the chief enemies of education, and
seats of learning the chief obstacles to the growth of knowledge, while
in an otherwise stagnant or decadent society these tendencies sooner
or later get the upper hand and utterly corrupt the social memory.
The power of the professor is revealed not so much by the things he
teaches, as by the things he fails or refuses to teach.
History is full of examples. How many religions have not perished
from ritual sclerosis, how many sciences have not been degraded into
pseudo-sciences or games! Logic has been just examinable nonsense for
over two thousand years. The present economic chaos in the world has
been indirectly brought about by the policy adopted by the professors
of economics forty or fifty years ago, to suit their own convenience.
For they then decided that they must escape from the unwelcome
attentions of the public by becoming more ‘scientific’; _i.e._ they
ceased to express themselves in plain language and took to mathematical
formulae and curves instead; with the result that the world promptly
relapsed into its primitive depths of economic ignorance. So soon as
the professors had retired from it, every economic heresy and delusion,
which had been exposed and uprooted by Adam Smith, at once revived
and flourished. In one generation economics disappeared completely
from the public ken and the political world, and the makers of the
Peace Treaties of 1919 were so incapable of understanding an economic
argument that not even the lucid intelligence of Mr Keynes could
dissuade them from enacting the preposterous conditions which rendered
impossible the realization of their aims.[A] Nor was it so very long
ago that, in order to save the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, it
had to be recast, because it had degenerated into an intellectual
jig-saw puzzle, wholly unrelated to the applications of mathematics
to the other sciences. To avoid jealousies, I hasten to add that the
University of Oxford, which has organized itself as an asylum for
lost causes, skilfully cultivates, by means of its classical and
historical studies, a backward-looking bias in its _alumni_. The true
‘Greats’ man is meant to go down indelibly imbued with the conviction
that in matters of morals and politics nothing of importance has been
discovered or said since Plato and Aristotle, and that nothing else
matters.
Clearly then we cannot take for granted that in any society knowledge
can progress without limits, nor can we count on our academic
institutions to save us from stagnation and decay, even in matters of
knowledge. All institutions are social mechanisms, and all mechanisms
need a modicum of intelligent supervision, in the absence of which they
become dangerous engines of destruction.