What's Wrong with the World
in a very wide-spread and flourishing industry of the present age. They
are making chains.
PART FOUR. EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD
I. THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY
When I wrote a little volume on my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is
needless to say that he reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to answer
and to criticise the book from the same disinterested and impartial
standpoint from which Mr. Shaw had criticised the subject of it. I was
not withheld by any feeling that the joke was getting a little
obvious; for an obvious joke is only a successful joke; it is only the
unsuccessful clowns who comfort themselves with being subtle. The real
reason why I did not answer Mr. Shaw’s amusing attack was this: that one
simple phrase in it surrendered to me all that I have ever wanted, or
could want from him to all eternity. I told Mr. Shaw (in substance) that
he was a charming and clever fellow, but a common Calvinist. He admitted
that this was true, and there (so far as I am concerned) is an end of
the matter. He said that, of course, Calvin was quite right in holding
that “if once a man is born it is too late to damn or save him.” That is
the fundamental and subterranean secret; that is the last lie in hell.
The difference between Puritanism and Catholicism is not about whether
some priestly word or gesture is significant and sacred. It is about
whether any word or gesture is significant and sacred. To the Catholic
every other daily act is dramatic dedication to the service of good
or of evil. To the Calvinist no act can have that sort of solemnity,
because the person doing it has been dedicated from eternity, and is
merely filling up his time until the crack of doom. The difference
is something subtler than plum-puddings or private theatricals; the
difference is that to a Christian of my kind this short earthly life
is intensely thrilling and precious; to a Calvinist like Mr. Shaw it is
confessedly automatic and uninteresting. To me these threescore years
and ten are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession)
they are only a long procession of the victors in laurels and the
vanquished in chains. To me earthly life is the drama; to him it is
the epilogue. Shavians think about the embryo; Spiritualists about the
ghost; Christians about the man. It is as well to have these things
clear.
Now all our sociology and eugenics and the rest of it are not so much
materialist as confusedly Calvinist, they are chiefly occupied in
educating the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of a
singular depression about what one can do with the populace, combined
with a strange disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity.
These essential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more
liberal and universal parts of Calvinism, such as the belief in an
intellectual design or an everlasting happiness. But though Mr. Shaw and
his friends admit it is a superstition that a man is judged after death,
they stick to their central doctrine, that he is judged before he is
born.
In consequence of this atmosphere of Calvinism in the cultured world of
to-day, it is apparently necessary to begin all arguments on education
with some mention of obstetrics and the unknown world of the prenatal.
All I shall have to say, however, on heredity will be very brief,
because I shall confine myself to what is known about it, and that is
very nearly nothing. It is by no means self-evident, but it is a current
modern dogma, that nothing actually enters the body at birth except a
life derived and compounded from the parents. There is at least quite as
much to be said for the Christian theory that an element comes from
God, or the Buddhist theory that such an element comes from previous
existences. But this is not a religious work, and I must submit to those
very narrow intellectual limits which the absence of theology always
imposes. Leaving the soul on one side, let us suppose for the sake of
argument that the human character in the first case comes wholly from
parents; and then let us curtly state our knowledge rather than our
ignorance.
*****
II. THE TRIBAL TERROR
Popular science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mild
as old wives’ tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, explained
to millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like a bottle of
blue beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads; and so the
child is like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow. He might just as
well have said that if the father has two legs and the mother has two
legs, the child will have four legs. Obviously it is not a question
of simple addition or simple division of a number of hard detached
“qualities,” like beads. It is an organic crisis and transformation of
the most mysterious sort; so that even if the result is unavoidable, it
will still be unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow
beads; it is like blue mixed with yellow; the result of which is green,
a totally novel and unique experience, a new emotion. A man might live
in a complete cosmos of blue and yellow, like the “Edinburgh Review”; a
man might never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire
sky; and still he might never have had so wild a fancy as green. If
you paid a sovereign for a bluebell; if you spilled the mustard on the
blue-books; if you married a canary to a blue baboon; there is nothing
in any of these wild weddings that contains even a hint of green. Green
is not a mental combination, like addition; it is a physical result
like birth. So, apart from the fact that nobody ever really understands
parents or children either, yet even if we could understand the parents,
we could not make any conjecture about the children. Each time the force
works in a different way; each time the constituent colors combine into
a different spectacle. A girl may actually inherit her ugliness from
her mother’s good looks. A boy may actually get his weakness from his
father’s strength. Even if we admit it is really a fate, for us it must
remain a fairy tale. Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvinists
and materialists may be right or wrong; we leave them their dreary
debate. But considered in regard to its results there is no doubt about
it. The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is as
lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity.
On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent
ignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral
heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense; that
is that one could calculate on them beforehand. There are six cases,
say, of a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice of character
as his grandfather; or perhaps there are sixteen cases, or perhaps
sixty. But there are not two cases, there is not one case, there are no
cases at all, of anybody betting half a crown that the grandfather will
have a grandson with the twitch or the vice. In short, we deal with
heredity as we deal with omens, affinities and the fulfillment of
dreams. The things do happen, and when they happen we record them; but
not even a lunatic ever reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like dreams
and omens, is a barbaric notion; that is, not necessarily an untrue, but
a dim, groping and unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himself
a little more free from his family. Before Christianity these tales of
tribal doom occupied the savage north; and since the Reformation and
the revolt against Christianity (which is the religion of a civilized
freedom) savagery is slowly creeping back in the form of realistic
novels and problem plays. The curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen and
superstitious as the curse of Ravenswood; only not so well written.
But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is not
irrational, and may be allowed like a hundred other half emotions that
make life whole. The only essential of tragedy is that one should take
it lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge rose to its highest in
the madder novels of Zola (such as that called “The Human Beast”, a
gross libel on beasts as well as humanity), even then the application
of the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling. The
students of heredity are savages in this vital sense; that they stare
back at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practice
no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physical
inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used except
for special modern purposes, such as the endowment of research or the
oppression of the poor.
*****
III. THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT
After all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore, it is only with
the born child that anybody dares to deal; and the question is not
eugenics but education. Or again, to adopt that rather tiresome
terminology of popular science, it is not a question of heredity but of
environment. I will not needlessly complicate this question by urging
at length that environment also is open to some of the objections and
hesitations which paralyze the employment of heredity. I will merely
suggest in passing that even about the effect of environment modern
people talk much too cheerfully and cheaply. The idea that surroundings
will mold a man is always mixed up with the totally different idea that
they will mold him in one particular way. To take the broadest case,
landscape no doubt affects the soul; but how it affects it is
quite another matter. To be born among pine-trees might mean loving
pine-trees. It might mean loathing pine-trees. It might quite seriously
mean never having seen a pine-tree. Or it might mean any mixture of
these or any degree of any of them. So that the scientific method here
lacks a little in precision. I am not speaking without the book; on the
contrary, I am speaking with the blue book, with the guide-book and the
atlas. It may be that the Highlanders are poetical because they inhabit
mountains; but are the Swiss prosaic because they inhabit mountains? It
may be the Swiss have fought for freedom because they had hills; did the
Dutch fight for freedom because they hadn’t? Personally I should
think it quite likely. Environment might work negatively as well as
positively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their wild
skyline, but be cause of their wild skyline. The Flemings may be
fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but because of
it.
I only pause on this parenthesis to show that, even in matters
admittedly within its range, popular science goes a great deal too fast,
and drops enormous links of logic. Nevertheless, it remains the working
reality that what we have to deal with in the case of children is,
for all practical purposes, environment; or, to use the older word,
education. When all such deductions are made, education is at least
a form of will-worship; not of cowardly fact-worship; it deals with a
department that we can control; it does not merely darken us with the
barbarian pessimism of Zola and the heredity-hunt. We shall certainly
make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by philosophy. But we
shall not merely make beasts of ourselves; which is the nearest popular
definition for merely following the laws of Nature and cowering under
the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains much moonshine; but not
of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots the slaves of a silver
magnet, the one eye of the world. In this decent arena there are fads,
but not frenzies. Doubtless we shall often find a mare’s nest; but it
will not always be the nightmare’s.
*****
IV. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION