Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (58 page)

So what would the bishop say about God? His argument was that there is a Universal Mind which inhabits all matter in the universe, and that the purpose of the universe is to evolve consciousness and conscience in order to produce goodness and, above all, beauty. His view on immortality was that there is no such thing as a ‘soul,’ and that the goodness and beauty that people create lives on after them. But he did also say that he personally believed in an afterlife.
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A copy of the book was sent to another eminent theologian, William Ralph Inge, dean of St Paul’s and the man who had quoted Rupert Brooke’s poems during his sermon on Easter Sunday, 1915. When he received Barnes’s book, Inge was already correcting the proofs of a book of his own,
God and the Astronomers,
which was published later that same year, 1933. It too had started life as a series of lectures, in Inge’s case the Warburg lectures, which he gave at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel in London.
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As well as being dean of St Paul’s, Inge was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Hertford College, Oxford, and well known as a lecturer, writer, and intellectual. His provocative views on contemporary topics had already been published as
Outspoken Essays. God and the Astronomers
tackled the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, and evolution. For Inge these fields were linked fundamentally because each was about time. The idea of a universe being created, expanding, contracting, and disappearing in a final Götterdämmerung, as he put it, was clearly worrying, since it raised the idea that there is no such thing as eternity.

The chief effect of evolution was to demote ideas in the past, arguing that more modern ideas had ‘evolved’ beyond them.
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Inge therefore deliberately made widespread use of the ancient philosophers – mainly Greek – to support his arguments. His aim was to show how brilliant their minds were, in comparison to those of the present. He made several references to ‘dysgenic’ trends, to suggest that evolution did not always produce advances. And he confessed that his arguments were intuitive, insisting (much as the poets were doing in Weimar Germany) that the very existence of intuition was a mark of the divine, to which science had no real answer.
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Like Henri Bergson, Inge acknowledged the existence of the
élan vital
and of an ‘impassable gulf between scientific knowledge and God’s existence. Like Barnes, he took as evidence for God’s existence the very concept of goodness and the mystical experiences of rapture that, as often as not, took place during prayer, which he said could not be explained by any science. He thought that civilisation, with its pressures and pace, was distancing us from such experiences. He hinted that God’s existence might be similar to the phenomenon that scientists call ‘emergent property,’ the classic example here being molecules of water, which are not themselves liquid in the way that water is. In other words, this was a scientific metaphor to support the argument for God.
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Inge, unlike Barnes, was unable to accept recent scientific advances: ‘It is a strange notion that God reveals himself more clearly and more directly in inanimate nature than in the human mind or heart…. My conclusion is that the fate of the material universe is not a vital question for religion.’
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Like Barnes, Inge made no reference to Freud.

A year after Barnes and Inge had their say, Bertrand
Russell
published a short but pithy book,
Religion and Science.
Russell’s relationship with religion was complicated.
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He had a number of friends who were religious (in particular Lady Ottoline Morrell), and he was both envious of and irritated by them. In a letter written in January 1912 he had said, ‘What we
know
is that things come into our lives sometimes which are so immeasurably better than the things of everyday, that it
seems
as though they were sent from another world and could not come out of ourselves.’
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But later he added, ‘Yet I have another vision … in this vision, sorrow is the ultimate truth … we draw our breath in pain … thought is the gateway to despair.’
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In
Religion and Science,
Russell covered much the same ground as Barnes and Inge – the Copernican revolution, the new physics, evolution, cosmic purpose – but he also included an analysis of medicine, demonology, and miracles, and a chapter on determinism and mysticism.
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Throughout most of the book, he showed the reader how science could explain more and more about the world. For a scientist, he was also surprisingly easy on mysticism, declaring that some of the psychic experiments he had heard about were ‘convincing to a reasonable man.’ In his two concluding chapters, on science and ethics, he wrote as a fierce logician, trying to prove that there is no such thing as objective beauty or goodness. He began with the statement, ‘All Chinese are Buddhists.’ Such a statement, he said, could be refuted ‘by the production of a Chinese Christian.’
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On the other hand, the statement ‘I believe that all Chinese are Buddhists’ cannot be refuted ‘by any evidence from China [i.e., about Buddhists in China]’, but only by evidence that ‘I do not believe what I say.’ If a philosopher says, ‘Beauty is good,’ it may mean one of two things: ‘Would that everybody loved the beautiful’ (which corresponds to ‘All Chinese are Buddhists’) or ‘I wish that everybody loved the beautiful’ (which corresponds to ‘I believe that all Chinese are Buddhists’). ‘The first of these statements makes no assertion but expresses a wish; since it affirms nothing, it is logically impossible that there should be evidence for or against it, or for it to possess either truth or falsehood. The second sentence, instead of being merely optative, does make a statement, but it is one about the philosopher’s state of mind, and it could only be refuted by evidence that he does not have the wish that he says he has. This second sentence does not belong to ethics, but to psychology or biology. The first sentence, which does belong to ethics, expresses a desire for something, but asserts nothing.’
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Russell went on, ‘I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value [Inge’s argument], this is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.’
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Again, there was no reference to Freud.

A
quite different line of attack on science came from Spain, from
José Ortega
y
Gasset’s
Revolt of the Masses,
published in 1930. Ortega was professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid, and his main thesis was that society
was degenerating, owing to the growth of mass-man, the anonymous, alienated individual of mass society, this growth itself of course due in no small measure to scientific advances. For Ortega, true democracy occurred only when power was voted to a ‘super minority.’ What in fact was happening, he said, was ‘hyper-democracy,’ where average man, mediocre man, wanted power, loathed everyone not like himself and so promoted a society of ‘homogenised … blanks.’ He blamed scientists in particular for the growth of specialisation, to the point where scientists were now ‘learned ignoramuses,’ who knew a lot about very little, focusing on their own small areas of interest at the expense of the wider picture. He said he had found such scientists ‘self-satisfied,’ examples of a very modern form of degeneration, which helped account for the growing absence of culture he saw encroaching all around him.

Ortega y Gasset was a sort of cultural social Darwinist, or Nietzschean. In
The Dehumanisation of Art,
he argued that it was ‘the essential function of modern art to divide the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot.’
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He thought that art was a means by which the elite, ‘the privileged minority of the fine senses,’ could recognise themselves and distinguish themselves from the ‘drab mass of society,’ who are the ‘inert matter of the historical process.’ He believed that the vulgar masses always wanted the man behind the poet and were rarely interested in any purely aesthetic sense (Eliot would have been sympathetic here). For Ortega y Gasset, science and mass society were equally inimical to ‘fine’ things.

With fascism on the rise in Germany and Italy, and the West in general beset by so many problems, people began to look to Soviet Russia to examine an alternative system of social organisation, to see whether the West could learn anything. Many Western intellectuals, such as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, paid visits to Russia in the 1920s and ‘30s, but the most celebrated at the time was the journey by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose account of their visit,
Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?
was published in 1935.

Well before the book appeared, the Webbs had a profound influence on British politics and society and were very well connected, with friends such as the Balfours, the Haldanes, the Dilkes, and the Shaws.
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Sidney Webb became a cabinet minister in both interwar Labour governments, and the couple formed one of the most formidable intellectual partnerships ever (Sidney was once called ‘the ablest man in England’).
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They founded the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1896, and the
New Statesman
in 1913, and were instrumental in the creation of the welfare state and in developing the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation that believed in the inevitability of gradual change. They were the authors, either singly or jointly, of nearly a hundred books and pamphlets, including
The Eight Hours Day, The Reform of the Poor Law, Socialism and Individualism, The Wages of Men and Women: Should They Be Equal?
and
The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation.
Committed socialists all their lives, the Webbs met when Beatrice wanted someone to help her study the co-op movement and a friend suggested Sidney. Lisanne Radice, the Webbs’ biographer, makes
the point that, on the whole, Sidney and Beatrice were more successful together, as organisers and theoreticians, than he was as a practical politician, in the cabinet. Their prolific writings and their uncompromising socialist views meant that few people were indifferent to them. Leonard Woolf liked them, but Virginia did not.
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The Webbs went to Russia in 1932, when they were both already in their mid-seventies. Beatrice instigated the visit, feeling that capitalism was in terminal decay and that Russia might just offer an alternative. In their books, the Webbs had always argued that, contrary to Marx, socialism could arrive gradually, without revolution; that through reason people could be convinced, and equality would evolve (this was the very essence of Fabianism). But with fascism on the rise, she and Sidney felt that if capitalism could be swept away, so too could Fabianism.
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In these circumstances, Russian collective planning became more viable. At the end of 1930 Beatrice began reading Russian literature, her choice being assisted by the Soviet ambassador to London and his wife. Almost immediately Beatrice made a note in her diary: ‘The Russian Communist government may still fail to attain its end in Russia, as it will certainly fail to conquer the world with a Russian brand of Communism, but its exploits exemplify the Mendelian view of sudden jumps in biological evolution as against the Spencerian vision of slow adjustment.’ (The social Darwinist Herbert Spencer had been a close friend of Beatrice’s father.) A year later, just before her trip, Beatrice wrote the words that were to be remembered by all her detractors: ‘In the course of a decade, we shall know whether American capitalism or Russian communism yields the better life for the bulk of the people … without doubt, we are on the side of Russia.’
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The Russia the Webbs set foot in in 1932 was near the end of the first Five–Year Plan, which Stalin had introduced in 1929 to force through rapid industrialisation and rural collectivisation. (Such plans were popular just then: Roosevelt introduced his New Deal in 1933, and in 1936 Germany brought in the four-year Schacht plan for abolishing unemployment by expanding public works). Stalin’s ‘plan’ led directly to the extermination of a million kulaks, mass deportation and famine; it extended the grip of the OGPU, the secret police, a forerunner of the KGB, and vitiated the power of trade unions by the introduction of internal passports, which restricted people’s movement. There were achievements – education improved and was available to more children, there were more jobs for women – but, as Lisanne Radice describes it, the first Five-Year Plan, ‘stripped of its propaganda verbiage … foreshadowed a profound extension of the scope of totalitarian power.’
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The Webbs, treated as important foreign guests, were kept well away from these aspects of Russia. They had a suite at the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad, so huge that Beatrice worried, ‘We seem to be a new kind of royalty.’ They saw a tractor plant at Stalingrad and a Komsomol conference. In Moscow they stayed in a guest house belonging to the Foreign Ministry, from where they were taken to schools, prisons, factories, and theatres. They went to Rostow, 150 miles northeast of Moscow, where they visited several collective farms. Dependent on interpreters for their interviews, the Webbs encountered only
one failure, a motor plant that was not meeting its production targets, and the only statistics they managed to collect were provided by the government. Here were the founders of the LSE and the
New Statesman
accepting information from sources no self-respecting academic or journalist would dream of publishing without independent corroboration. They could have consulted Malcolm Muggeridge, the
Manchester Guardian’s
correspondent in Moscow, who was married to Beatrice’s niece. But he was highly critical of the regime, and they took little notice of him. And yet, on their return, Beatrice wrote, ‘The Soviet government … represents a new civilisation … with a new outlook on life – involving a new pattern of behaviour in the individual and his relation to the community – all of which I believe is destined to spread to many other countries in the course of the next hundred years.’
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