In the Beginning

IS THERE ANY HOPE IN EDUCATION?

The usual answer is that we must educate our masters: which is,

ourselves. We must teach citizenship and political science at school.

But must we? There is no must about it, the hard fact being that we must

_not_ teach political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster

who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets

without pupils, if not on the dock pleading to a pompously worded

indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the

morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the

military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of

the illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see

through this imposture, preach and teach a better gospel? The individuals

whom they convert are doomed to die in a few years; and the new

generations are dragged back to the schools and to the morality of the

fifteenth century while thinking themselves Liberal when they are defending

the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly, when they are opposing to them

the ideas of Richard III. Thus, the educated man is a greater nuisance

than the uneducated one: indeed, it is the inefficiency and sham of the

educational side of our schools (to which, except under compulsion,

children would not be sent by their parents at all if they did not act

as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the mature) which

saves us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of

drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no way out

through the schoolmaster.

HOMEOPATHIC EDUCATION

In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any

other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is

said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or

may not be true: what is certain is this, if you teach a man anything, he

will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease, he will be unable

to cure himself the next time it attacks him. Therefore, if you want

to see a cat clean, you throw a bucket of mud over it, then it will

immediately take extraordinary pains to lick the mud off, and finally be

cleaner than it was before. In the same way doctors who are up to date when

they want to rid you of a disease or a symptom, inoculate you with the disease or

give you a drug which produces the symptom, in order to provoke you to resist it as the mud provokes the cat to wash itself.

Now an acute person will ask me why, if this be so, our false education

does not provoke our scholars to find out the truth. My answer is that

it sometimes does. Voltaire was a pupil of the Jesuits, Samuel Butler

was the pupil of a hopelessly conventional and erroneous country parson.

But then Voltaire was Voltaire, and Butler was Butler: which is, their

minds were so abnormally strong that they could throw off the doses of

poison which paralyze ordinary minds. When the doctors inoculate you and

the homeopathists dose you, they give you an infinitesimally attenuated

dose. If they gave you the virus at full strength it would overcome your

resistance and produce its direct effect. The doses of false doctrine

given at public schools and universities are so vast that they overwhelm

the resistance which a tiny dose would provoke. The normal student is

corrupted beyond redemption, and will drive the genius who resists out

of the country if he can. Byron and Shelley had to fly to Italy, whilst

Castlereagh and Eldon ruled the roost at home. Rousseau was hunted from

frontier to frontier; Karl Marx starved in exile in a Soho lodging.

Ruskin's articles were refused by the magazines (he was too rich to be

otherwise persecuted); whilst mindless forgotten nonentities governed

the land; sent men to the prison or the gallows for blasphemy and

sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State); and sedulously

stored up the social disease and corruption which explode from time to

time in gigantic boils which have to be lanced by a million bayonets.

This is the result of allopathic education. Homeopathic education has

not yet been officially tried, and would obviously be a delicate

matter if it were. A body of schoolmasters inciting their pupils to

infinitesimal peccadilloes with the object of provoking them to exclaim,

'Get thee behind me, Satan,' or telling them white lies about history

for the sake of being contradicted, insulted, and refuted, would

certainly, do less harm than our present educational allopath’s do; but

then nobody will advocate homeopathic education. Allopathy has produced

the poisonous illusion that it enlightens instead of darkening. The

suggestion may, however, explain why, whilst most people's minds succumb

to inculcation and environment, a few react vigorously: honest and

decent people coming from thievish slums, and sceptics and realists from

country parsonages.

THE DIABOLICAL EFFICIENCY OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION

But meanwhile--and here comes the horror of it--our technical

instruction is honest and efficient. The public schoolboy who is

carefully blinded, duped, and corrupted as to the nature of a society

based on profiteering, and is taught to honor parasitic idleness and

luxury, learns to shoot and ride and keep fit with all the assistance

and guidance which can be procured for him by the most anxiously sincere

desire that he may do these things well, and if possible, superlatively

well. In the army he learns to fly; to drop bombs; to use machine-guns

to the utmost of his capacity. The discovery of high explosives is

rewarded and dignified: instruction in the manufacture of the weapons,

battleships, submarines, and land batteries by which they are applied

destructively, is quite genuine: the instructors know their business,

and really mean the learners to succeed. The result is which powers

of destruction which, could hardly without uneasiness, be entrusted to

infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of

romantic schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by

education ignoramuses: dupes, snobs, and sportsmen to whom fighting is a

religion and killing an accomplishment. Whilst political power, useless

under such circumstances except to militarist imperialists in chronic

terror of invasion and subjugation, pompous tuft hunting fools,

commercial adventurers to whom the organization by the nation of its own

industrial services would mean checkmate, financial parasites on the

money market, and stupid people who cling to the status quo merely

because they are used to it, is obtained by heredity, by simple

purchase, by keeping newspapers and pretending they are organs of

public opinion, by the wiles of seductive women, and by prostituting

ambitious talent to the service of the profiteers, who call the tune

because, having secured all the spare plunder, they alone can afford

to pay the piper. Neither the rulers nor the ruled understand high

politics. They do not even know there is such a branch of knowledge

as political science: but between them they can coerce and enslave

with the deadliest efficiency, even to the wiping out of civilization,

because their education as slayers has been honestly and thoroughly

carried out. Essentially the rulers are all defectives; and there is

nothing worse than government by defectives who wield irresistible

powers of physical coercion. The commonplace sound people submit, and

compel the rest to submit, because they have been taught to do so as

an article of religion and a point of honor. Those in whom natural

enlightenment has reacted against artificial education submit because

they are compelled; but they would resist, and finally resist

effectively, if they were not cowards. And they are cowards because they

have neither an officially accredited and established religion nor a

generally recognized point of honor, and are all at sixes and sevens

with their various private speculations, sending their children perforce

to the schools where they will be corrupted for want of any other

schools. The rulers are equally intimidated by the immense extension

and cheapening of the means of slaughter and destruction. The British

Government is more afraid of Ireland now that submarines, bombs, and

poison gas are cheap and easily made than it was of the German Empire

before the war. Consequently, the old British custom which maintained a

balance of power through command of the sea is intensified into a terror

which sees security in nothing short of absolute military mastery of the

entire globe: which is, an impossibility which will yet seem possible

in detail to soldiers and to parochial and insular patriotic civilians.

FLIMSINESS OF CIVILIZATION

This situation has occurred so often before, always with the same result

of a collapse of civilization (Professor Flinders Petrie has let out the

secret of previous collapses), which the rich are instinctively crying

'Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die,' and the poor, 'How long, O

Lord, how long?' But the pitiless reply still is that God helps those

who help themselves? This does not mean that if Man cannot find the

remedy no remedy will be found. The power which produced Man when the

monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than Man if

Man does not come up to the mark. What it means is that if Man is to be

saved, Man must save himself. There seems no compelling reason why he

should be saved. He is by no means an ideal creature. At his present

best many of his ways are so unpleasant they are unmentionable in

polite society, and so painful he is compelled to pretend pain

is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must

stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try

another experiment.

What hope is there then of human improvement? According to the

Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because improvement

can come only through some senseless accident which must, on the

statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by some other

equally senseless accident.

CREATIVE EVOLUTION

But this dismal creed does not discourage those who believe that the

impulse which produces evolution is creative. They have observed the

simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain

pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and

organize new tissue to do it with. To them therefore mankind is by no

means played out yet. If the weightlifter, under the trivial stimulus

of an athletic competition, can 'put up a muscle,' it seems reasonable

to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could 'put

up a brain.' Both are directions of vitality to a certain end. Evolution

shows us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things: providing

the centipede with a hundred legs, and ridding the fish of any legs at

all; building lungs and arms for the land and gills and fins for the

sea: enabling the mammal to gestate its young inside its body, and the

fowl to incubate hers outside it; offering us, we may say, our choice of

any sort of bodily contrivance to maintain our activity and increase our

resources.

VOLUNTARY LONGEVITY

Among other matters apparently changeable at will is the duration of

individual life. Weismann, a very clever and suggestive biologist who

was unhappily reduced to idiocy by Neo-Darwinism, pointed out that death

is not an eternal condition of life, but an expedient introduced to

provide for continual renewal without overcrowding. Now Circumstantial

Selection does not account for natural death: it accounts only for the

survival of species in which the individuals have sense enough to decay

and die on purpose. But the individuals do not seem to have calculated

very reasonably: nobody can explain why a parrot should live ten times

as long as a dog, and a turtle be almost immortal. In the case of man,

the operation has overshot its mark: men do not live long enough: they

are, for all the purposes of high civilization, mere children when they

die; and our Prime Ministers, though rated as mature, divide their

time between the golf course and the Treasury Bench in parliament.

Presumably, however, the same power which made this mistake can remedy

it. If on opportunist grounds Man now fixes the term of his life at

three score and ten years, he can equally fix it at three hundred, or

three thousand, or even at the genuine Circumstantial Selection limit,

which would be until a sooner-or-later-inevitable fatal accident makes

an end of the individual. All which is necessary to make him extend his

present span is that tremendous catastrophes such as the late war shall

convince him of the necessity of at least outliving his taste for

golf and cigars if the race is to be saved. This is not fantastic

speculation: it is deductive biology if there is such a science as

biology. Here, then, is a stone which we have left unturned, and which may

be worth turning. To suggest more entertaining than it would be to most people in the form

of a biological treatise, My relative and inspiration for my latest book, In the Beginning,

George Bernard Shaw has written a wonderful book, titled Back to Methuselah as a

contribution to the modern Bible and is contained in my book!

Many people, however, can read treatises and cannot read Bibles. Darwin

could not read Shakespeare. Some who can read both, like to learn the

history of their ideas. Some are so entangled in the current confusion

of Creative Evolution with Circumstantial Selection by their historical

ignorance that they are puzzled by any distinction between the two.

For all their sakes I must share a little history of the conflict

between the view of Evolution taken by the Darwinians (though not

altogether by Darwin himself) and called Natural Selection, and that

which is emerging, under the title of Creative Evolution, as the

genuinely scientific religion for which all wise men are now anxiously

looking.

If you have enjoyed this bit of lunacy...drive yourself crazy by getting the book, In the Beginning which should be at book stores by the first of the year or wait until spring and the eBook will be free at The Project Gutenberg! Please make a donation there if you can because they are doing great work.

WELBY THOMAS COX, JR.

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