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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Choice of Belief in Modern Society

Choice of Belief in Modern Society

[One of the most notable addresses at Curious Cove this year was delivered by the well-known poet, James K. Baxter. We are pleased to be able to print below a condensed version of Mr Baxter’s address, whose title was ‘Choice of Belief in Modern Society’. By ‘belief ’, Mr Baxter said, he meant ‘unconscious assumptions concerning the nature and destiny of man,’ though for his part, being a layman of the Church of England, he accepted the beliefs set forth in the Apostles’ Creed. He continued]:

At this time our sense of security can only be ‘a blind man’s dream on the sand by dangerous tides.’ The fact that the sun will rise for us in the morning (apart from Hume’s doubt) is by no means certain. We cannot reasonably expect a full lifetime in which to search for true equilibrium and understanding: many of us may die sooner than we had expected to – and violently. So it is necessary that we should assess our intellectual goods, as if to make our wills, dividing the true from the false. In this assessment the arts may assist us – for artists are driven by their dissatisfaction with ready-made intellectual furniture and must endeavour to communicate their own fragmentary intuition of what is true – an intuition that often runs counter to the popular climate of opinion.

The moral and political view against which most artists with reason rebel is that which I will call the Comfortable View. In the sphere of morals thispage 81 view involves the assumption that we are all pretty good fellows; that all a man wants or needs is personal economic security; that compassion, horror and self-examination are alike morbid. A world of human life and industry may be destroyed in Korea; one’s neighbours’ marriages may fall apart; one’s own heart may grow cold – and these things are regarded as natural, inevitable, and not evidence of a disastrous flaw in human affairs and in the nature of man.

Optimistic slogans, a medicine for every ailment; a change of Government, a rise in wages, a winning double – the promise that we can change our natures by changing our clothes – it is with us every day and does not touch the deep sense of isolation and malaise, of meaninglessness which explodes inward and produces those symptoms which go by the name of neurosis and psychosis. Forgetting the child’s nightmare and the guilts of adolescence we can forget that life is demanding and terrible; but only at a loss.

Now, even those who do not take a comfortable view of human nature and their own and others’ actions, have a strong nostalgia for this view. In his Memoirs of an Infantry Officer Siegfried Sassoon tells how, after coming back wounded from the front line, he came to the conclusion that the war was an abomination and that he must protest against it. But after talking to his commanding officers and various friends, the afflatus left him, and he began to feel that he had been a fool – this not by intellectual persuasion but by the contagion of mood. As Eliot puts it – ‘Humankind cannot bear too much reality.’ Yet the work of artists, the testimony of saints, and our own experience at moments of moral crisis, points to the fact that our feeling that great wrong is done and great good can be done is truth and the Comfortable View an illusion.

Many artists, however, while accepting the fact that men can take pleasure in doing evil, consider that we have been corrupted by civilisation, and that a return to a simple life would make us good. This I would call the belief in Idyllic Man. There are some factors which make this view a plausible one. But always Idyllic Man is somewhere over the horizon – five hundred years ago, another country, another race, with the glamour of distance – especially in the childhood of the author. He is a dream figure, a little less than living; generally an excuse to blame our environment for our vices and our distress. He is not, in fact, a being capable of moral choice.

The fable of Idyllic Man has its value, if only as an alternative to the logic of the anthill. There is a poem by David Campbell, a contemporary Australian, called ‘Hatter in Utopia’:

‘They have my curse,’ the hatter cried,
‘Who got a thought with child,
Who wrote an answer in the sky
And tamed the brilliant wild
page 82 Scrub horses in the hill country
And the broad plain lands defiled.’

‘I was man and I was bird,’
I heard the hatter sing;
‘I rode the immaculate cold air
Upon the eagle’s wing.
Now bird looks down on ant and men
Walking in a ring.’

. . .

‘Fiend or angel, saint or beast,’
I heard the hatter say –
‘My love and I beneath the briar
Naked and sinning lay,
Yet the briar-rose on the briar tree
Shone like the milky way.’

Despite the excellence of the poem it would be disastrous to take it seriously. It represents perhaps the revolt of the individual against mechanist society: man has moved from the city to the wilderness, girl-friend in tow. As a pretty fable with a grain of truth it has its place, not as a serious attempt at a scheme of values. The poet has very suitably put his verses in the mouth of a madman.

The popular belief most widely held in Western countries is not, however, idyllic – it involves, rather, the assumption of inevitable Progress, material and moral. I remember the comment of an American doctor representing UNESCO in this country, when a friend of mine showed him some verse I had written – ‘Waal,’ he said, ‘as long as you proGRESS, you’ll be all right – as long as you proGRESS.’ Perhaps in the period before the First World War the doctrine of Progress seemed reasonable – but after concentration camps, massacres and indiscriminate bombing of cities, can we believe that human nature has really changed since the time of the Roman Empire or Genghis Khan? Certainly our tools are better than those of Paleolithic Man; but we use them for the same purposes – to acquire food or to batter in a neighbour’s skull. I feel that many political thinkers have used an unjustifiable parallel – that physical evolution implies moral evolution.

I have mentioned the individualist belief in Idyllic Man and also the popular belief in inevitable Progress. Apart from these, I believe that at the heart of modern man’s view of his environment there is a myth at least as old as the Greek dramatists. I mean the myth of Prometheus. Prometheus was the rebel, the Light-Bringer who stole fire from the gods to benefit his fellow-men; and for this he was chained forever to a rock in the Caucasus,page 83 where a vulture tore at his liver. Now, fire is the magical element, and also the one which most enables humans to control their environment. The myth can conveniently symbolise the advent of modern science, and that popular belief which has accompanied it – that by biology, psychology, and science or -ism, we can master our remorses, banish our bad dreams, and – to put it bluntly – be happy without being good. True, among scientists themselves labour and research is very likely done for its own sake, without any unreal expectations. But in popular thought there is the dream of new mastery – interplanetary travel, atomic fission, the discovery of new drugs – a vast accumulation of systematised knowledge, which may (and this is the magical hope) eventually deliver man from moral as well as material bankruptcy and make him, in terms of the original myth, one of the gods.

It may seem humourless to make much of the so-called funnies. But in the comic strips the Promethean myth occurs in its crudest form. Superman, Buck Rogers, Captain Marvel – the heroes possess great physical strength and all the equipment of the fairytale hero – seven-league boots, the cloak of invisibility, the gat that never fails. But unlike Homer’s Odysseus or the Little Tailor, they are remarkably brainless; and they never elope with the king’s daughter – sex is taboo for the comic strip hero. Neither does he ever die – and this is perhaps the crux of the matter. Our civilisation has banished insanity to the asylums, disease and death to the hospitals, crime to the penitentiary. If our faculties are at a low enough ebb, we can persuade ourselves that we are physically and morally invulnerable.

In the genuine arts the Promethean myth takes another form – no longer man the Light-Bringer, but man chained to his Caucasian rock of suffering and isolation, and groping for self-understanding. Spiritual terror and isolation form the whole vocabulary of many poets; for example, in the early work of Dylan Thomas:

Ears in the turrets hear
Hands grumble on the door,
Eyes in the gables see
The fingers at the locks.
Shall I unbolt or stay
Alone till the day I die
Unseen by stranger-eyes
In this white house?
Hands hold you poison or grapes?

Or alternatively –

I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
page 84 And the old terrors’ continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea.

The theme of angst, of suffering at the very core of the mind, is strong in the work of Thomas and that of many modern poets. Similarly in painting, the human shape is disfigured and dismembered; partly no doubt for the sake of technical experiment, but partly also as a symbol of the mutilation of man’s moral being.

The Promethean view is in the main individualistic; the occasion for works of art, with little immediate application in the social and political sphere. There is another view, primarily a political one, both adult and formidable – I would call it the belief in Revolutionary Man: that by disciplined effort and revolt against existing injustices, man in society can achieve harmony. There are, as I see it, two possible interpretations of this view – either that by revolution in a country a working-class regime can be established, no more just than any other regime that we know; or (and I believe that the dedication of Communists to their Party springs from this hope) that by the devotion of a few and the re-education of many, people will become more just and loving in their actions, within a State valued by all – if not in one generation, then in several generations.

It must have seemed to many writers in the Thirties that by a single effort of arms and character they could throw off not only constricting social injustices but also their own private burden of anxiety and solipsism. Their disillusionment may have been inevitable; but I by no means intend to join the ravens who croak at the death of every enthusiasm.

Among thinking people, especially those who are young and relatively clear-sighted, a revolutionary attitude is common and I think justifiable. One becomes aware of the greed and shoddiness, the falsehood of modern society, and the fact that many wear out their lives in meaningless and mechanical occupations. The political slogans of progress and equality must seem so much hot air. The revolutionary view is an assertion of the dignity of humans and the necessity for civic justice. But its great weakness lies in an over-estimation of one’s own goodwill and the goodwill of one’s fellow- revolutionaries.

Now these needs and wishes, as I see it, are transcendental. The revolutionary is intolerant of existing order because it seems to him mean, trivial, unjust – he breaks the law in obedience to the Law written in his own heart. But usually he does not scrutinise his own motives carefully enough: his philosophy legitimises his envy and hatred of others or his will to power, as part of the wish for justice – and this can be fatal. If he refuses to submit the whole of his mind to the Light of justice within him he cannot see clearly to build a better society; worse, he ceases to wish for it.

page 85

So far I have presented four popular views of human nature – the Comfortable View, and also the beliefs in Idyllic, in Promethean, and in Revolutionary Man. No doubt these categories are arbitrary; but I think they fairly represent the assumptions behind much modern thinking.

I come now to a different view, the one held by Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky; in part by the Greek dramatists – I mean the view that we are moral beings whose suffering proceeds from our denial of the Light of conscience and that this denial is universal among us. This I would call the tragic view.

Brutus, for what seems the best of motives, aids the assassination of Caesar. In that action is the beginning of his downfall – he is obliged to condone the nepotism of Cassius, and his desire for a just State is inevitably frustrated. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, for what appear sufficient reasons, murders an unpleasant old woman. His subsequent sense of self- condemnation and isolation from the human family drives him to give himself up to the police. Anna Karenina, out of love for Vronski, leaves her husband and child. She finds that she has destroyed her own peace of mind; and her relationship with Vronski steadily deteriorates until their final separation and her suicide. Creon in the Antigone, allows himself to be swayed by his own arrogance under the cloak of civic zeal. He is at last terribly defeated by the machinery he has set in motion. The inevitable tragic repercussions of disobedience of inward moral Law compose in these recognised masterpieces the ‘moral scheme’ to which Lawrence objects so strongly. I think the evident truth and force of characterisation in these works spring from the author’s recognition of humans as moral beings capable of free choice and inescapably answerable for the wrong choice. The peculiar desolation of the tragic hero moves us because we all in some measure share it in our own lives. It is the common human predicament. But inversely it implies the dignity of man which all other views of human nature contrive to whittle away.

I do not pretend to have the full answer. But since my criticism of the more optimistic view of human affairs has been mainly destructive I intend to make some further suggestions.

In the first place I suggest that our ideas as such (Peace, Freedom, Progress, a New World Order) are practically useless. They are still conceived in terms of our over-valuation of our own moral capabilities. I suggest that the whole concept of ‘society’ or ‘the State’ must go. We continually deify our ideas and make idols of them. But what stays when all else is stripped away is the relationship of individual to individual with which all morality that we need care a scrap for is concerned. Society, so called, is as I see it a frigid overcoat designed to muffle away from each other our true natures, both the criminal odour and the spontaneous self-forgetfulness which sometimes astonishes us. By a world of aridly comfortable concepts, people cut themselves off from the only world where things make sense, where their animal and spiritual partspage 86 function inseparably, through work, sex and suffering, in the fear of death and the power of charity.

What most of us recognise late, if at all, is that we have complete power of moral self-determination. The power of Government, Church or any authority has no more sanction than that which our own sense of right and wrong gives it. And the greatest public danger in this country as in others is State worship. If a man wears epaulettes or has a university degree, it does not follow that he has the right to command us or the knowledge to solve our problems for us. Many are in fact tired, muddled old men who have long buried their own power to tell the truth and act upon it. All that concerns us is the naked force for good or evil of our own relationships – and this, I would say, is part of the freedom of which Buber speaks. These are the greatest chains: the ones we impose on ourselves. But we continue to be ruled in our sexual attitudes by the prejudices of our parents or in our political outlook, by some man who carries into a political group the kind of authoritarianism possessed by many Bible Class leaders. As I see it, the type of the successful revolutionary is Francis, standing naked before his Bishop and recognising no claims before the power of the love of God in his own heart.

Hence I feel that the division of private and public ethics springs from a purely negative view of morality. One should exercise a private moral choice in all public affairs. For example in the matter of the recent Police Offences Act. Many of us recognised its inherent injustice; but relatively few of us made our voices heard. And there are other issues of equal importance. At the present time a certain number of New Zealanders are fighting in Korea. Before long many of us may be conscripted to fight in a larger war. I do not propose to discuss the pros and cons of pacifism and militarism – no -ism can be much help to us. But if we had met our Chinese neighbours with a more active charity we would have less to fear from them. In China, out of starvation and disorder, a movement has come which carries the perennial hope of a just State. I think we should consider by the light of conscience and reason in what relationship we stand to the individual Chinese citizen; and in what measure a soldier in any war is blood-guilty.

Finally I suggest that people, if they can recognise their own freedom from all except membership of the human family, should have the courage to look hard at the cancers of the world and share the physical and spiritual suffering of others. In shared suffering, I believe, lies our regeneration. We are inclined, Christian and non-Christian, to look on the Crucifixion of Christ as a single horrible event, terrible to contemplate but unique. We forget that it was the usual method by which the Romans executed criminals; and that the occasion was only unique because of who He was; and that we have it in our hearts to sanction similar barbarities, and would if we could wash our hands like Pilate.

1952 (52)