Biran came closer to history during the hundred days. At the time of Napoleon’s first abdication, he had gone over enthusiastically to the royalist side—he had always been a loyal supporter of the King—so when Napoleon came back from Elba he was in a very awkward and unpleasant position. But even then he was able to escape into the world of pure intellectual speculation: ‘I live in this world of speculation foreign to all the interests of the outside world. These speculations keep me from thinking of the actions of my fellow men, and this is fortunate, for I cannot think of them except to hate them and despise.’ In the same way, in an earlier century, we get the testimony of Montaigne, who says in his marvellously frank and honest way, ‘I cannot too much stress with how little an expense to my peace of mind I have lived half my life in my house, while my country was in ruins.’
Such facts are of enormous significance. They show that even this small-scale, short-range, catastrophic history, which goes on all the time in its violent and brutal way, and which, as Toynbee says, occupies ‘the headlines of our newspapers and the foregrounds of our minds,’ does not very much engage us. Although at certain moments we may be painfully involved, for the most part we can continue to live our intensely private lives.
This was certainly the experience of a great many people during the catastrophes of recent years, although a very important point which has to be stressed is that in contemporary times—above all in totalitarian countries, but to an increasing extent in democratic countries as well—the governmental authorities have gone out of their way to prevent people’s escaping into their private lives during moments of crisis. Hitler had the strongest objections to permitting people to live in their private world, and the Russians still do, insisting upon everyone’s becoming engaged and enmeshed in short-range history. It would be very difficult now for a Maine de Biran or a Jane Austen to live quite so completely apart from the historical moment, largely because wars and revolutions involve entire populations rather than small bodies of professional fighting men.
Nevertheless the difference between private life and public life, between biography and history, still remains a very strong one. We see clearly in the nature of our newspapers the fact that most people are not much interested in the public life of their times. Most of the space in newspapers is given up to the more sensational events of private life, such as murders and divorces, and a relatively small amount is given to the consideration of the great historical events of our time. This is the most striking difference between newspapers in the Western world and newspapers in the totalitarian regimes, where almost no space is given to the adventures of private life and the ideas on which public life is based are drummed in continuously in propagandist articles. This makes the newspapers, I imagine, incredibly dull, but it serves the purpose of the rulers, which is to indoctrinate their subjects and to make them go single-minded in a certain direction.
One of the best ways of looking at the divorce between private and public life is to consider the idea and the fact of progress. To what extent is it a fact of our subjective life? Progress is a modern myth which arose in the time of the Renaissance and came to its flowering in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Previously the whole idea had been that man had had a golden age in the past and had been going steadily downhill since. From the time of the Renaissance onward the golden age was in the future and man was going up. There have been several versions of the myth. There was the idea, which was very popular in the eighteenth century, that if you got rid of priests and kings, then automatically the golden age would appear. Then there was the myth of the nineteenth century, that industrialization would bring universal peace. This expression of the myth died rather painfully during this century; the First World War and the Russian Revolution gave it a serious blow, and it was polished off by the more recent events of the Second World War and the Atom Bomb.
But although the myth is no longer tenable, we can nevertheless say that progress is a fact. There is quite clearly a trace of progress recognizable within the natural order—the fundamental basic progress from the inorganic to the organic, the evolution of giant molecules which could reproduce themselves and which made life possible, the passage from extremely simple forms of life to more complex forms capable of adapting themselves to different kinds of environments and finally even controlling the environment. We see progress from the animals which produce their young with eggs to the animals which produce embryos and control temperature within the body and then to the animals which develop a highly organized nervous system.
Although it is quite clear that within the biological range everything which has developed in the past persists to this day—the giant molecules still persist in the form of viruses; so do the single cell organisms still persist—nevertheless at the leading edge of the development there is something which can quite clearly and legitimately be described as progress. The same thing seems to be true even within the human sphere, where evolution has ceased for the most part to be biological and hereditary. We still have the same kind of innate capacities which our ancestors had, but—owing to the facts that we have language and can accumulate knowledge—we use those capacities in a much more effective way for controlling our environment today than in the past. We are perfectly justified in saying that there has been genuine progress, although one can still go about this world and find neolithic and even palaeolithic people.
The question, then, is: While this progress can be observed objectively, to what extent can it be experienced? Obviously the original biological progress was never experienced, partly for the good reason that for about two billion years there was nobody to experience it in a conscious way. Even after man arose, for almost all of his time on earth he was, as an individual, completely unable to experience progress, for the simple reason that progress took place extremely slowly.
Now, however, progressive changes in the field of technology and the field of ideas are taking place in spans which are measured by decades or less. Thus it should at least theoretically be possible for the individual to have a direct subjective experience of progress. And, to some extent, he does. Nevertheless it remains true that we don’t experience progress subjectively very much, although we observe it, we read about it, we see the signs of it in buildings and new types of aeroplanes and so on.
There are many reasons why we don’t experience progress as much as we might expect that we should. To start with, human life is not a progressive action. It rises to a certain level, proceeds on a plateau, and then sinks down. Inasmuch as human life is intrinsically non-progressive, we cannot expect that there will be in many phases of it a very strong subjective experience of the progress which we can objectively observe. It is very difficult to ask old people to be aware of the world going up and up when they themselves are going down and down. In the second place, man has an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. When something new comes in, it is rather astonishing for a day or two, and then it is accepted as part of the order of things. What today is a golden ceiling overhead becomes—when we make the climb and get to it—a disregarded floor under our feet. Then, too, we must remember that every child is born into the world as it exists at that moment and has no experience of the world as it was before.
To a child born into the world at the present time, TV and jet planes are a part of the order of things. He has no idea of the sort of world in which I was brought up, which was a world of horses and trains, although these curious (to him) neolithic survivals still exist. This is another reason why it is as exceedingly difficult for us to experience progress subjectively as it is to experience other aspects of public and historical life: most of us are concerned only with the facts of our private lives, with family relationships, with squabbles, with jealousies, with pity for the people around us, with envy, with sex, with gossip. We are involved only in the life of the molecule, not in the life of the gas.
For all these reasons, then—because our life span is so short and progress in the past has been so slow, because we
