The effort to reduce diversity to identity can be, and generally is, carried too far. This is particularly true in regard to thinkers who are working in fields not subjected to the discipline of one of the well-organized natural sciences. Natural science recognizes the fact that there is a residue of irrational diversity which cannot be reduced to the identical and the rational. For example, it admits the existence of irreversible changes in time. When an irreversible change takes place, there is not an underlying identity between the state before and the state after the change. Science is not only the effort to reduce diversity to identity; it is also, among other things, the study of the irrational brute fact of becoming. There are two tendencies in science; the tendency towards identification and generalization and the tendency towards the exploration of brute reality, accompanied by a recognition of the specificity of phenomena.
Where thought is not subject to the discipline of one of the organized sciences, the first tendency—that towards identification and generalization—is apt to be allowed too much scope. The result is an excessive simplification. In its impatience to understand, its hunger and thirst after explanation, the intellect tends to impose more rationality upon the given facts than those facts will bear, tends to discover in the brute diversity of phenomena more identity than really exists in them—or at any rate more identity than a man can make use of in the practical affairs of life. For a being that can take the god’s-eye view of things, certain diversities display an underlying identity.
By the animal, on the contrary, they must be accepted for what they seem to be, specifically dissimilar. Man is a double being and can take, now the god’s-eye view of things, now the brute’s-eye view. For example, he can affirm that chalk and cheese are both composed of electrons, both perhaps more or less illusory manifestations of the Absolute. Such reduction of the diverse to the identical may satisfy our hunger for explanation; but we have bodies as well as intellects, and these bodies have a hunger for Stilton and a distaste for chalk. In so far as we are hungry and thirsty animals, it is important for us to know that there is a difference between what is wholesome and what is poisonous. Their reduction to an identity may be all right in the study; but in the dining-room it is extremely unhelpful.
Over-simplification in regard to such phenomena as chalk and cheese, as H2O and H2SO4, leads very rapidly to fatal results; it is rarely therefore that we make such over-simplifications. There are, however, other classes of phenomena in regard to which we can over-simplify with a certain measure of impunity. The penalty for such mistakes is not spectacular or immediate. In many cases, indeed, the makers of the mistake are not even aware that they are being punished; for the punishment takes the form not of a deprivation of a good which they already possess, but of the withholding of a good which they might have come to possess if they had not made the mistake. Consider, by way of example, that once very common over-simplification of the facts which consists in making God responsible for all imperfectly understood phenomena. Secondary causes are ignored and everything is referred back to the creator. No more wholesale reduction of diversity to identity is possible; and yet its effect is not immediately perceptible. Those who make the mistake of thinking in terms of a first cause are fated never to become men of science. But as they do not know what science is, they are not aware that they are losing any thing.
To refer phenomena back to a first cause has ceased to be fashionable, at any rate in the West. The identities to which we try to reduce the complicated diversities around us are of a different order. For example, when we discuss society or individual human beings, we no longer make our over-simplifications in terms of the will of God, but of such entities as economics, or sex, or the inferiority complex. Excessive simplifications! But here again the penalty for making them is not immediate or obvious. Our punishment consists in our inability to realize our ideals, to escape from the social and psychological slough in which we wallow. We shall never deal effectively with our human problems until we follow the example of natural scientists and temper our longing for rational simplification by the recognition in things and events of a certain residue or irrationality, diversity and specificity.
We shall never succeed in changing our age of iron into an age of gold until we give up our ambition to find a single cause for all our ills, and admit the existence of many causes acting simultaneously, of intricate correlations and reduplicated actions and reactions. There is, as we have seen, a great variety of fanatically entertained opinions regarding the best way of reaching the desired goal. We shall be well advised to consider them all. To exalt any single one of them into an orthodoxy is to commit the fault of over-simplification. In these pages I shall consider some of the means which must be employed, and employed simultaneously, if we are to realize the end which the prophets and the philosophers have proposed for humanity—a free and just society, fit for non-attached men and women to be members of, and such, at the same time, as only non-attached men and women could organize.
Chapter III EFFICACY AND LIMITATIONS OF LARGE-SCALE SOCIAL REFORM
Among people who hold what are called ‘advanced opinions’ there is a widespread belief that the ends we all desire can best be achieved by manipulating the structure of society. They advocate, not a ‘change of heart’ for individuals, but the carrying through of certain large-scale political and, above all, economic reforms.
Now, economic and political reform is a branch of what may be called preventive ethics. The aim of preventive ethics is to create social circumstances of such a nature that individuals will not be given opportunities for behaving in an undesirable, that is to say an excessively ‘attached,’ way.
Among the petitions most frequently repeated by Christians is the prayer that they may not be led into temptation. The political and economic reformer aims at answering that prayer. He believes that man’s environment can be so well organized, that the majority of temptations will never arise. In the perfect society, the individual will practise non-attachment, not because he will be deliberately and consciously non-attached, but because he will never be given the chance of attaching himself. There is, it is obvious, much truth in the reformer’s contention. In England, for example, far fewer murders are committed now than were committed in the past. This reduction in the murder rate is due to a number of large-scale reforms—to legislation restricting the sale and forbidding the carrying of arms; to the development of an efficient legal system which provides prompt redress to the victims of outrage. Nor must we forget the change of manners (itself due to a great variety of causes) which has led to the disparagement of duelling and a new conception of personal honour. Similar examples might be cited indefinitely. Social reforms have unquestionably had the effects of reducing the number of temptations into which individuals may be led. (In a later paragraph, I shall consider the question of the new temptations which reforms may create.)
When the absence of temptation has been prolonged for some time, an ethical habit is created; individuals come to think that the evil into which they are not led is something monstrous and hardly even thinkable. Generally, they take to themselves the credit that is really due to circumstances. Consider, for example, the question of cruelty. In England the legislation against cruelty to animals and, later, children and adults, was carried through, against indifference and even active opposition, by a small minority of earnest reformers. Removal of the occasions of indulging in and gloating over cruelty resulted after a certain time in the formation of a habit of humanitarianism.
Thanks to this habit, Englishmen now feel profoundly shocked by the idea of cruelty and imagine that they themselves would be quite incapable of performing or watching cruel acts. This last belief is probably unfounded. There are many people who believe themselves to be fundamentally humane and actually behave as humanitarians, but who, if changed circumstance offered occasions for being cruel (especially if the cruelty were represented as a means to some noble end), would succumb to the temptation with enthusiasm. Hence the enormous importance of preserving intact any long-established habit of decency and restraint. Hence the vital necessity of avoiding war, whether international or civil.
For war, if it is fought on a large scale, destroys more than the lives of individual men and women; it shakes the whole fabric of custom, of law, of mutual
