Video meliora proboque;
Deteriora sequor.
To see and approve the better is useless, if one then regularly proceeds to pursue the worse. What is the philosophy of life that should be taught? And what are the proper techniques by means of which people can persuade themselves to act upon their convictions? These are questions which will be dealt with in a later chapter.
So much for the first method of heightening resistance to suggestion. It will be seen that this consists essentially in teaching young people to dispense with the agreeable stimulations offered by the newspapers, wireless and films—stimulations which serve, as I have said, to bait the propagandist’s hooks. A boycott of sports news and murder stories, of jazz and variety, of film love, film thrills and film luxury, is simultaneously a boycott of political, economic and ethical propaganda. Hence the vital importance of teaching as many young people as possible how to amuse themselves and at the same time inducing them to wish to amuse themselves.
The other method of heightening resistance to suggestion is purely intellectual and consists in training young people to subject the devices of the propagandists to critical analysis. The first thing that educators must do is to analyse the words currently used in newspapers, on platforms, by preachers and broadcasters. What, for example, does the word ‘nation’ mean? To what extent are speakers and writers justified in talking of a nation as a person? Who precisely is the ‘she,’ of whom people speak when discussing a nation’s foreign politics? (‘Britain is an imperial power. She must defend her Empire.’) In what sense can a nation be described as having a will or national interests? Are these interests and will the interests and will of the entire population? or of a majority? or of a ruling caste and a few professional politicians? In what way, if any, does ‘the state’ differ from Messrs.
Smith, Brown, Jones and the other gentlemen who happen for the moment to have secured political power? Given the character of Brown, Jones etc., why should ‘the state’ be regarded as an institution worthy of almost religious respect? Where does national honour reside? Why would the loss of Hong-Kong, for example, be a mortal blow to Britain’s honour, while its seizure after a war in which Britain attempted to force the Chinese to buy opium was in no way a stain upon the same honour? And so on. ‘Nation’ is only one of several dozens of rich and resonant words which are ordinarily accepted without a thought, but which it is essential, if we would think clearly, that we should subject to the most searching analysis.
It is no less important that children should be taught to examine all personifications, all metaphors and all abstractions occurring in the articles they read, the speeches they listen to. They must learn to translate these empty words into term’s of concrete contemporary reality. When an Asquith says, ‘we shall not sheathe the sword which we have not lightly drawn,’ when an Archbishop of Canterbury affirms ‘that force, the sword, is the instrument of God for the protection of the people,’ they must learn to translate this noble verbiage into the language of the present. Swords have played no appreciable part in war for the last two hundred years. In 1914 Asquith’s sword was high explosives and shrapnel, machine-guns, battleships, submarines. In 1937 the ‘instrument of God for the protection of the people’ was all the armaments existing in 1914 plus tanks, plus aeroplanes, plus thermite, plus phosgene, plus arsenic smokes, plus Lewisite and many other instruments of murder, more efficient and more indiscriminate than anything known in the past. It is frequently in the interest of the rulers of a country to disguise the true facts of contemporary reality under thick veils of misleading verbiage. It is the business of educators to teach their pupils to translate these picturesque or empty phrases into the language of contemporary reality.
Verbal propaganda is not the only nor even, perhaps, the most effective form of organized suggestion. There is another kind, specially favoured by modern commercial propagandists and used from time immemorial by such non-commercial advertisers as kings, priests and soldiers. This consists in arbitrarily associating the idea which is to be suggested with some object, some image, some sound, some literary description, that is either intrinsically delightful or in some way suggestive of pleasantness. For example, the advertiser of soap will show a picture of a young voluptuous female, about to take a bath among plumbing fixtures of pink marble and chromium. The advertiser of cigarettes will show people dining in what the lady novelists describe as ‘faultless evening dress,’ or reproduce the photograph of some well-known film star, millionairess, or titled lady.
The advertiser of whisky will illustrate a group of handsome men lounging in luscious upholstery and being waited upon by the most obsequious of family retainers. The aim in all such cases is the same—to associate the idea of the goods offered for sale with ideas which the public already regards as delightful, such as the idea of erotic pleasure, the idea of personal charm, the idea of wealth and social superiority. In other cases the idea of the merchandise is associated with intrinsically delightful landscapes, with funny or pathetic children, with flowers or pet animals, with scenes of family life.
In countries where radio advertising is permitted, commercial propagandists find it worth their while to associate the idea of their cars, their cigarettes, their breakfast cereal or what not with performances by comedians or concerts of vocal or orchestral music. This last is the type of association favoured by kings, soldiers and priests. From the beginning of history, rulers have ‘put themselves across’ by associating the idea of their government with magnificent pageantry, with impressive architecture, with every kind of rare, splendid and beautiful thing. It is the same with the soldier. Military music intoxicates like wine, and a military review is, in its own way, no less inebriating. (The author of the Song of Songs goes so far as to establish an emotional equivalence between a sexually desirable person and an army with banners.) Priests make use of an essentially similar type of propaganda. Systematically, they have always associated the idea of their god and of themselves as the god’s representatives with intrinsically delightful works of art of every kind, from music and architecture to dressmaking, with symbols of wealth and power, with organized joy and organized terror and mystery even, in many religions, with organized cruelty and lust.
Propaganda of this kind generally proves irresistible. Cigarettes are bought in ever-increasing quantities; ever vaster and more loyal crowds flock to military reviews, to royal and dictatorial pageants, to the splendid ceremonials of nationalistic idolatry. Once again resistance to suggestion can be heightened only by sharpening the critical faculty of those concerned. The art of dissociating ideas should have a place in every curriculum. Young people must be trained to consider the problems of government, international politics, religion and the like in isolation from the pleasant images, with which a particular solution of these problems has been associated, more or less deliberately, by those whose interest it is to make the public think, feel and judge in a certain way. The training might begin with a consideration of popular advertising. Children could be shown that there is no necessity and organic connection between the pretty girl in her expensive dressing-gown and the merits of the tooth-paste she is intended to advertise.
This lesson might be brought home by practical demonstrations. Chocolates could be wrapped in a paper adorned with realistic pictures of scorpions, and castor-oil and quinine distributed from containers in the form of Sealyham terriers or Shirley Temple. Having mastered the art of dissociation in the field of commercial advertising, our young people could be trained to apply the same critical methods to the equally arbitrary and even more dangerously misleading associations which exist in the fields of politics and religion. They would be shown that it is possible for a man to get the fullest aesthetic enjoyment out of a military or religious pageant without allowing that enjoyment in any way to influence his judgment regarding the value of war as a political instrument or the truth and moral usefulness of the religion in question. They would be taught to consider monarchy and dictatorship on their own political and ethical merits, not on the choreographical merits of processions and court ceremonials, not on the architectural merits of palaces, not on the rhetorical merits of speeches, not on the organizational merits of a certain kind of technical efficiency. And so
