Britain and a Moral Revival
by LORD ELTON
1
IT is possible to see the entire history of mankind as no more than a series of brief interludes of peace and prosperity punctuated by the appalling calamities brought about by the vices to which, during every such interlude, man has invariably succumbed.
Certainly the World War of 1914 to 1918, sequel to an era whose tranquillity and prosperity were paralleled only in the age of the Antonines, falls clearly enough into some such category. And the twenty years’ armistice which followed it is an even clearer example of that moral regression to which elaborate civilizations are always liable in time of peace, and particularly during the mood of revulsion which follows a great war.
During those years of moral reaction, both in Britain and in the United States most of the speaking and writing was done by men and women who had taken but little part in the labors and sacrifices of the years of war, and for that very reason were in revolt not only against the war itself, but against the ordinary men and women who had won it, and against the simple virtues they had displayed. In both countries a sustained campaign was conducted by a small but highly vocal minority against the tough, fundamental qualit ies on which not only (as they doubtless remembered) resistance in war, but also (as they certainly forgot) civilization itself, depends. Courage, loyalty, discipline, and endurance, it was generally assumed in these coteries, were outmoded relics of an overexacting past, and no modern need be ashamed to profess their counterparts: bad faith, cowardice, self-indulgence, and surrender.
“Something fatal and subversive is undermining the morale of the nation,” said the New York HeraldTribune in August, 1941, and the same uncompromising verdict would have been equally true of Britain at any time between 1920 and 1939 — with the proviso, in both cases, that this was a moral dégringolade among the vocal few rather than the unvocal many. In Britain, at least, there was during these years a sustained effort to “debunk” (as contemporary jargon phrased it) most of the qualities and most of the institutions which, as another world war has now reminded us, are indispensable not only to an effective war effort but to civilization itself. Thus the British Commonwealth — the only League of Nations which has as yet both organized permanent peace within its own frontiers and gone to the aid of a victim of aggression without itself being attacked — could scarcely be mentioned upon a political platform without a sneer or an apology.
For years fashionable war fiction presented the successful soldier as a butcher, a drunkard, or a Blimp. The war itself was at best “ an immense crop of murders.” “Punctuality, regularity, discipline, industry are a set of slave virtues,” wrote one of our best-known left-wing intellectuals. The family became, for advanced persons, but one more prison house to be broken down. “I am sure,” wrote Mr. Bertrand Russell, “that University life would be better, both intellectually and morally, if most University students had temporary childless marriages.” “There is no such thing as a moral law,” declared Professor John MacMurray in a popular series of broadcast talks.
Up-to-date art became an esoteric chatter between the studios, fatally divorced from average humanity, a sort of code-writing for a few thousand initiates. Imitations of Negro sculpture, engineering diagrams, drawings which suggested the scribbling of lunatics or children, patterns framed upon chance blots or the natural shape of stones, the escapist and inhuman cults of Abstract and Surrealist art, the deliberate unintelligibilities of Miss Gertrude Stein or Mr. James Joyce — all these and many other strange fashions followed each other in bewildering rapidity from artists who ignored, because they despaired of, the man in the street. Above all, religion, both personal and institutional, was manifestly on the decline.
2
IT is not too much to say that we entered the war handicapped by twenty years of propaganda against the virtues needed to win it. How far can it now be said that four years of fighting have enabled us to rid ourselves of the contagion?
At first sight such a question may seem to answer itself. The victory in the Battle of Britain, the heroism of countless ordinary people in the blitzes, the year’s solitary stand in defense of civilization — undoubtedly all these are evidence of stout hearts and level heads. Nonetheless, this is by no means the whole of the answer. For “the treason of the clerks” was the sudden decadence of a vocal few, which had not yet had time to infect the unvocal many when once again a mortal challenge recalled the nation to its ancient virtues. And it is conceivable that, despite the courage and vigor everywhere now discernible, the intellectual virus of the interwar years may yet linger in the body politic, ready to reinfect us with cynicism, selfishness, and cowardice when the strain of war is over — or conceivably if the strain becomes too great.
Has there been a real moral resurgence? Are current ideas and ideals of noticeably higher quality? Are the shabby old shibboleths visibly abandoned? Is war transforming us into a nation fit to shape — as, between them, the victors must — the pattern of the new age?
It is easier, of course, to assess the quality of public ideals than the standard of private conduct. Yet the standard of private conduct is integral to our estimate; indeed it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that in the last analysis no other factor counts. For despite a fashionable illusion to the contrary, moral revival does not mean passing resolutions about a Better Britain. Whatever political nostrums it embraces, a community can never rise above the moral level of the individuals of which it is composed, and there can never be a Better Britain without better Britons. Whatever political and economic machinery be set in motion to abolish selfishness and cruelty in society, they will infallibly return in new guises unless men themselves have ceased to be cruel and selfish. It is proverbially difficult to make men virtuous by Act of Parliament, so that in the long run the public reform of the state depends upon the private reform of the citizen.
It is far from easy to estimate standards of personal conduct, but it so happens that the other day the Archbishop of Canterbury pronounced an opinion on this subject which would, I think, be endorsed by almost all qualified observers. Where patriotic sentiments and the demands of the war effort regulate men’s actions, he said, their standards are very high, but in that part of men’s lives which is not regulated by the war, their standards arc often low. He instanced the increase in the incidence of venereal disease, and the alarming decline in personal honesty. After the last war, he said, we used to point to the fact that it was not safe to leave luggage lying about in an Italian railway station as evidence of the decadence of Italy; today it can hardly be claimed that luggage is much safer in Britain.
To all this it should, I think, in fairness be added that the heroism and neighborliness of the blitzes have been nation-wide, while lechery and dishonesty, although they have undoubtedly increased, nevertheless remain the vices of a very small minority. And there are other personal virtues not catalogued by Dr. Temple— the new simplicity of life and manners, the patience under the burdens of anxiety, toil, and taxation. In general it is inevitably a checkered picture; but especially if it be remembered that the deadliest sin, according to Christian ethics, is not dishonesty, nor yet lust, but pride, the final estimate must be favorable.
And religion, particularly non-institutional religion, has very notably revived. At the universities young men and women, who used to argue about Marx, now argue about God, I was told not long ago by an official of the Ministry of Information that any unknown person who hired the Town Hall at Birmingham and advertised a revivalist meeting could be certain of a full house. Almost every town in the country has formed an interdenominational Christian Front, and has held, or is to hold, its Religion and Life week. Publishers are unable to meet the demand for Bibles. The writings of Mr. C. S. Lewis, an extraordinarily lucid university popularizer of Christian doctrine, are conspicuous best-sellers.
The President of the Board of Education has just published a White Paper on his proposals for educational reform. The two most notable advances which he is planning have both been made possible by this wartime transformation of the moral atmosphere. One is a virtual settlement of the religious problem in the state schools. For the first time since the Act of 1870, effective Christian teaching will be given in every state school, and every school day will commence with a corporate act of worship. Parliament, in short , will be asked to recognize that this is a Christian country, and that the schools of a Christian country must provide Christian education.
The other reform made possible by the changed temper of wartime is less obvious but scarcely less significant. In two important respects the Minister intends to broaden the educational ladder of opportunity which leads, by way of free scholarships, from the elementary school to the university. At two important stages the leaders of the future are no longer to be selected by a mere examination in book learning — in which, it may be remarked, in early youth Shakespeare, Cromwell, and Winston Churchill himself would almost certainly have been floored. In various ways opportunities are to be provided for the candidate’s school record, as well as his examination papers, to be taken into account. This means that for the first time the prize boy will earn advancement not by quick-wittedness only, but through showing signs of possessing some of the many other qualities indispensable for success in life. Such a change would have been denounced a few years back as evidence of crypto-fascism. Today, thanks to our return to the normal, it is stirring not a ripple of controversy.
3
THE picture becomes much more clear-cut if we turn to the ideas and ideals now current in the nation. The tradition of Lytton Strachey, literary progenitor of so much moral defeatism; the tradition of the titter and the yawn; the theme of the once immensely influential Eminent Victorians, that almost all achievement is “bogus” and every hero to be debunked — this, in the rising generation at least, is stone dead. At the universities there has been a startling change since 1940 among students. Achievement is admired more than criticism. It is significant that most of the notable war literature so far produced has come from airmen. A high executive of the British Broadcasting Corporation remarked to me the other day that it was still not too easy to find a university man over thirty without some traces of what he called the Lytton Strachey complex, but that in those under twenty-five it is virtually unknown.
This is fundamental to conversion, for a nation which can believe in nothing will certainly achieve nothing. One of the most significant evidences of this change is the steady transformation in the attitude of the nation to the Empire. Before the war there was a widespread apathy, tempered by hostility and rooted in ignorance. For universities and schools ignored imperial history (the examiners for the Higher Cert ificate set a paper on the history of the German Empire but none on the history of the British Empire) and I have heard a teacher of history at Oxford declare in public that the English went to India to conquer — which is about as crude a factual solecism as to assert that the Mayflower sailed in 1783.
Protected by this massive ignorance as to simple historical events, it was possible for critics to accuse the pre-war Empire of militarism — at a time when the Dominions were more completely disarmed than any other modern state save Luxemburg, and when, in the whole of the sixty-odd Colonies, there were less than thirty thousand armed men, most of them in semi-military formations. Even the friends of the Empire defended it with an irrepressible note of apology in their voices.
All this is visibly and rapidly changing. Thus one of the minor activities of the Imperial Institute is to provide lectures on Empire subjects — mainly descriptive and factual — for state elementary schools. Lecturers only go to schools to which they are invited, and whether they are invited or not depends in effect upon the inclinations of youthful audiences. These lectures, which were once a trickle, are now a torrent. Last year the demand for them doubled, and in the first six months of this year it doubled again. These children are not interested in flag-wagging. As the reports from their headmasters and headmistresses repeatedly stress, they want to hear about exports and imports, what social services we are providing for backward peoples, or how exactly it has come about that a Dominion is as self-governing as Britain herself.
In response to a growing demand, the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. are beginning to organize a series of lectures on similar topics for service men and women and for women war workers. Russia and the League of Nations are no longer the chief topics discussed in popular debating societies.
Another straw in the wind is the spectacular growth during the last two years of Empire Youth Sunday. This is an annual religious observance at which young people are invited to dedicate themselves anew to the service and fellowship of the world-wide Commonwealth. Parades and services are held in cathedrals, churches, chapels, and halls, often with some moving ritual or pageantry designed by the neighborhood for the occasion. Before the war, Empire Youth Sunday had a hard struggle for existence. Last year something like 75 per cent of all our parishes held some sort of observance. This year the proportion was considerably higher. Here again the emphasis is on the responsibilities of citizens of the world-wide Commonwealth to God, to their fellow members, and to mankind. These young people evidently believe both in their destiny and in their duties.
It is usual in wartime for the intellectuals to retire into the wings; for an intellectual is a person mature in intelligence but immature in character and experience, and it is no use making epigrams during an earthquake. (“Intellectual” is an unsatisfactory label, but Napoleon’s “ideologue” means something a little different.) That indeed was the root of the trouble after the last war; Lytton Strachey (Eminent Victorians was published in 1918) was voicing the pent-up resentment of an intelligentsia which for four years had been compelled to surrender the center of the stage to its traditional butt — the strong, silent man. Tn this war too the intellectual inevitably has quitted ihe center of the stage. But today there is one significant change. Plenty of intellectuals are busy designing a Better Britain, and are scrambling happily for the substantial share of the limelight which still falls upon Planners. There is an obvious advantage in the mere fact that such of the intelligentsia as is not fighting should be thus actively employed, for it is all the less likely to be in the mood to initiate a moral reaction after the war.
The danger in the present cult of the Plan is that we may be tempted to evade the intimate challenge of wartime to our own personal standards in a spate of impersonal blueprints of a Brave New World. This is a temptation to which so far, I believe, we have not yielded. The nation is too busy with the present for many pipe-dreams of the future. It has expelled the pre-war virus from its system. It has recovered its grasp of the simple, traditional virtues. Once again it believes in itself, and in the future.