All my life, or at least the latter part of it, I have been trying to discover the meaning of the word “paradox.” It seems to have two meanings - a statement that seems to contain a contradiction or to be intrinsically improbable, and a statement that happens to be different from the catchwords common at a particular moment. Now, as a fact, these catchwords themselves often are paradoxes. These catchwords themselves are often intrinsically contradictory or improbable. So that, by the simple operation of stating the dull and obvious truth, one may gain quite a picturesque reputation for dashing and dazzling paradox. For instance, it is a pure paradox to say, as the modern English have said for so long, that it is more practical not to be logical. Its exactly like saying that book-keeping is more practical if it ignores simple addition, and assumes that two and two make five. It is exactly like saying that carriage-building is more practical when we abandon the attempt to make circular wheels and are content with wheels of any rough and approximate outline, like that of an ellipse or an egg. In other words, it is not only paradoxical, but nonsensical. Yet all the books and papers and patriotic poems and stories I read in my youth repeated again and again this paradox: that our conclusions would be right if our reasoning was wrong. I ventured to say, in my humdrum and prosaic fashion, that I did not think this was so; and instantly all those thousands of paradox-mongers accused me of paradox. Or again, it was pure paradox in the old Utilitarians to say that if everybody was egotistical the result would somehow be social. Yet the men who, like Ruskin, merely pointed out the fantasy of this fantasy, were themselves called fantastic. By a sober and industrious attention to this little rule, I also have managed to get myself called fantastic or paradoxical. But I have always found that, whenever one of these truisms was thus criticised, the truism very soon came true.

  So it was in this case of the journalistic joke in England about the Fundamentalist in America. I pointed out long time ago in these columns that what was the matter with America and Americans was not that they were bad or good, or wise or foolish, or corrupt or public-spirited, but simply that they were almost incredibly backward and behind the times. I pointed out that this involved virtues as well as vices. It is sometimes just as well to be behind the times, when they are such bad times as modern progress is apparently in for. But, for good or evil, America is a generation behind. Yet when I said that, any number of people cried out in protest against such a provocative absurdity, asking me if I knew more about electricity than Edison, or whether I had seen the labour-saving appliances in the New York apartments. By this time journalists who have joked about “Monkeyville” may be disposed to admit that, if I know less about electricity than Edison, I know more about evolution than the late William Jennings Bryan. Now Mr. Bryan was not only an orator of genius, he was a public figure who had been the Secretary of State and might have been President. Suppose we imagine a British statesman of Cabinet rank, let us say Earl Balfour, intervening in a scientific and religious debate. Who can imagine him going back fifty years, dressing up as Disraeli, in order to defy Professor Huxley with the words: “I am on the side of the Angels”? That is practically what Mr. Bryan did, because his whole world was fifty years old. Earl Balfour’s intervention would quite certainly be about something new, like Einstein; certainly not about something as old as Darwin. Earl Balfour is supposed to be a Tory and Mr. Bryan was supposed to be a Radical; the former is an aristocrat, the latter was a Democrat. But do not let us forget that tradition is one of the true virtues of democracy. Do not let us forget that curiosity and innovation, the appetite for anything new, are among the vices of aristocracy. England has suffered a great deal from the progressive spirit of all aristocrats. It has been hurried into fashion after fashion, and folly after folly, in every department from Dress to Religion. There is a great deal too much Einstein in the English governing class. Exactly what England has lacked for the last few centuries has been the strong family traditions that exist in farmers and rooted social types; England has not enough tenacity in religion and morals. In another and far more fundamental sense, what she lacks is Fundamentalism.

  And now that the journalists have had their joke, perhaps it would be well to realise that the joke is partly against them. In so far as some of them seem to imagine that Darwinism is a final scientific discovery, like the circulation of the blood, the joke is entirely against them. It is rather old-fashioned to fly into a fuss about the sudden appearance of Mr. Charles Darwin in the scientific world. But it is almost as old-fashioned to be completely overwhelmed by the appearance of that rising young biologist. It is almost antiquated to fancy Darwin has proved his case merely because he has presented his case. From the point of view of a REALLY rising biologist today, the fun of the Darwinian leading articles must be even funnier that the fun of the Fundamentalists. A French or Italian scientist would probably be as much amused at the assumption that nobody can contradict Darwin as the Darwinian is at the assumption that nobody must contradict Moses. But if we are, in some ways, a little behind the main march of European knowledge, at least we are a long way ahead of the New World and its pioneers. O pioneers! This naturally gives us a certain gratification in the case of commercial pretensions; but do not let us forget the other side. In one sense Darwin is still a rising and recent and youthful figure. And that is in the sense that his theory is still a juvenile hypothesis and has never come of age as a law. The child has not yet been successfully reared; nor is it certain that the suggestion of the survival of the fittest will be the fittest to survive. Now it is likely that the English were much too eager to swallow it. A mere craze tied us to Darwin, as it might now tie us to Einstein. It might have been better for science if we had shown a little more of the spirit of Dayton versus Darwin. For even Fundamentalism is better god than Fashion.

  COMPULSORY EDUCATION AND THE MONKEY TRIAL

  The Illustrated London News, 8th August 1925

  My remarks last week about the Dayton controversy were written just before, though they were published just after, the sensational news of the sad death of Mr. Bryan. I should like to state this fact, in case there should have been any unreasonable touches of flippancy, on a matter about which most people in this country were flippant. And indeed, in any case, I think that many people in this country were rather too flippant. There really was a moral to “Monkeyville,” and it was not the moral that most of us were tempted to draw; still less the joke that most of us were tempted to make. It is something that remains after the comedy of Dayton and after the tragedy of Bryan. Indeed, it is something that was there before this comic and tragic crisis came, and would still have been there if it had never come. When all is said and done, there really was and is a modern problem, which was the real problem troubling the honest jurymen of Tennessee.

  For the problem is likely to prove a nuisance. It will be none the less a nuisance in the future because nobody is taking any particular trouble to face it in the present. In practical politics the survival of the fittest frequently means only the survival of the fussiest. And I fancy I can foresee a very considerable fuss, in the near future, about the Dayton difficulty, which some ridiculed as merely a thing of the past. The particular question of whether Americans are on the side of the angels or on the side of the apes, in the single scandal of alleged materialism at “Monkeyville,” may indeed be a thing of the past. Anyhow, journalists may now be excused for treating it as a thing of the past; though, curiously enough, there are two quite contrary reasons for calling it so. One set of scientists will say it is an old business because Natural Selection is established. Another set of scientists will say it is an old business because Natural Selection is exploded. The old biologists may still think Darwinism too new to be disputed. The young biologists will often think it too old to be defended. But those who think Darwin too right to be questioned, and those who think Darwin too questionable to be followed, may well join in thinking him a very old subject to be discussed. They may well, therefore, decline any further discussion; and, even if they are not bored with Darwin, they may well be bored with Dayton.

  But the real problem that remains has nothing necessarily to do with either Dayton or Darwin. It is a real problem because it has to do with the real world of existing education and politics. It is not concerned with professors of fifty years ago, but with the schoolmasters of to-day. It is a problem of the schools; a problem of education; it is not concerned with monkeys, but with men. And if “Monkeyville” did not exactly solve it, most of those who make fun of “Monkeyville” do not seem even to know that it exists to be solved. So far from having discovered the solution, they have not yet discovered the problem. And in that respect , all enlightened Evolutionists who have smiled over the affair are really much less advanced, much less in touch with the time, much less aware of the new world of the twentieth century, than the wild Fundamentalists of Tennessee.

  The problem arises out of compulsory education. It is the great paradox of the modern world. It is the fact that at the very time when the world decided that people should not be coerced about their form of religion, it also decided that they should be coerced about their education. Queen Elizabeth made an Act of Conformity by which all populace had to go to church; Queen Victoria saw the making of another Act of Conformity by which all the populace had to go to school. Now in pure reason it is quite clear and quite certain that both were in the same sense persecution. Both assumed certain things to be true, and punished anybody who acted as if they were false. But this rational recognition was covered and confused for some time by two facts - or fictions. The first was what may be called the Theory of the Three R’s. That is, it was a theory that instruction could be confined to things so simple and so self-evident that nobody but a lunatic would be in the least likely to dispute them. The other was what may be called the Theory of Secular Education, which people with more confused minds called Unsectarian Education, or Undenominational Education. That is, it was a theory that religion, in the strict sense of theology, was the only thing about which even the lunatics would be likely to quarrel. In short, the theory was that a Christian and a Mahometan might learn the same lessons in the same class, on ninety-nine subjects out of a hundred, so long as nobody mentioned Mahomet or mentioned Christ. It seems strange that nobody noticed the limitations of such a view. Men do not, indeed, talk incessantly at every dance or dinner-party on the subject of Mahomet. But men do occasionally talk about wine. Men do even in their wilder moments talk about wives. And the Moslem and the Christian must either be taught separately about wine and wives; or they must be taught together at the expense of one religion or the other; or they must never be taught about wine or wives at all. The latter is what ought logically to follow from unsectarian education, though it seems a little defective as a detailed scheme of instruction about life. In practice, few people do exclude these topics as theological. Few people say, when offered a glass of sherry: “Do not be so denominational.” Few consider a remark: “My wife is at Brighton,” as a provocative and wounding reflection on the Koran. But this was not because religious disagreements do not matter, but because on these points most Englishmen did not really disagree in religion. But with the growth of new philosophies and theories, they do really disagree in religion. The Prohibitionist does think it not only denominational, but disgraceful, to drink the glass of sherry. The Free Lover does not think it disgraceful, or perhaps even denominational, to be connected with five women instead of one. In other words, we can no longer feel that religious controversy will only arise out of religious conversation. In that sense, we can no longer be sure that religion can only arise out of religion.

  Now it is nonsense to say that such a philosophy cannot be inculcated except through theology. It is nonsense to say that you have kept such things out of the schools merely by keeping the priest out of the school, when you admit the professor into the school. The professor can preach any sectarian idea, not in the name of a sect, but in the name of a science. The professor can preach the devilish destructiveness of the glass of sherry, and call it a lesson in psychology or pathology. The professor can preach the advantages of polygamy, and call it a lesson in anthropology or history. The professor can insinuate any ideas about life because biology is the study of life. The professor can suggest any view of the nature of man because history is the story of man. And the case is complicated by the fact that the educationists are teaching more and more subjects, even while pretending to preach fewer and fewer creeds. It is impossible to use the old argument of the self-evident character of the Three R’s when the Three R’s really stand for Reason, Religion, and Rationalism. It is impossible to argue at once that the schoolmaster ought to teach everything, and to argue that he will teach nothing that will not please everybody. In practice he need only teach whatever pleases somebody; that somebody being himself. And if his own private opinions happen to be of the rather crude sort that are commonly contemporary with, and connected with, the new sciences or pseudo-sciences, he can teach any of them under cover of those sciences. That is what the people of Dayton, Tennessee, were really in revolt against. And that is where the people of Dayton, Tennessee, were really and completely right.

  It is obviously most unjust that the old believer should be forbidden to teach his old beliefs, while the new believer is free to teach his new beliefs. It is true that the Bible-worship of the Fundamentalists is not really very old. It is true that the Natural Selection of the Darwinians is not really very new. But in those American conditions the things stand in some such relation; and, however they stand, the general argument is left standing. It is obviously unfair and unreasonable that secular education should forbid one man to say a religion is true and allow another to say it is untrue. It is obviously essential to justice that unsectarian education should cut both ways; and that if the orthodox must cut out the statement that he has a Divine origin, the materialist must cut out the statement that man has a wholly and exclusively bestial origin. The difficulty arises from the combination of the widening of education with the exclusion of religious education. But if the Fundamentalists say that some secularists abuse the right of secular education, they say what is exceedingly probable — and, if they say it is intolerable, they tell the truth.

  THE IDEAL OF A LEISURE STATE

  The Illustrated London News, March 21, 1925

  Among the strange and rather stiff antics of the rather antiquated art of party journalism is the duty laid upon the good party man of trying to disagree with his opponents when they have the impudence to agree with him. He not only has to insist that they are wrong; he has to deny their right to be right. Even when you have to admit that your antagonist is talking sense, even when you pride yourself on talking exactly the same sense, you have to deny that it is sensible of him to talk sense. Or you deny that it is sense in the same sense; or sense in the true sense of the word. More often you simply imply that it is inconsistent and irrational in him to talk sense, because it is his whole duty and high function in State to talk nonsense. It is his business to be wrong; it is his business to be beaten; he is the invisible playmate, who sides with the Frenchman and never can win. That he should suddenly side with his own country, or win the approval of his own critics, is regarded as a form of cheating. Twice lately I have noticed a party leader saying things that any sensible person would say, but not allowed by the Opposition Press to say them, because he was not supposed to be a sensible person. One of them was when Mr. Baldwin pointed out the appalling peril of directly declaring war on all Trade Unionists at the very moment when we are supposed to be persuading them not to be Bolshevists. The other was when Mr. George Lansbury said to the effect that the dole was a deplorable necessity, because every man in the world ought to grow up expecting to work. But the conventional journalists, instead of agreeing with Mr. Landsbury, sneered at him for agreeing with them.

  Well, that way of working against Bolshevism will have its Nemesis; the Nemesis of all nonsense, which is neglect. A new generation will go straight to the problems and forget all about the party quarrels. If we want to know what the future will be like, as far as anybody can know it, we must begin at the springs of thought and theory, the sources of the river, and not merely potter about in the swamps where it straggles away into its last labyrinthine delta of lobbying and intrigue. We must consider what ideas there are in the world at present, and in what way they are likely to mould the future. Now Mr. George Lansbury, whether consciously or not, really touched on one of the most important of these intellectual conflicts, which so often precede political and even military conflicts. And the position which he took up upon that matter was that of a conservative or a traditionalist; or as some on the otherside would say, of a Tory.