New Years Reading: A Key To Social Changes

Northern Advocate, 29 December 1937, Page 2

New Years Reading: A Key To Social Changes

I T>ECEN.T and expected new books of ' importance or special interest in- ]! elude Professor Levy’s “A Philosophy 1 for a Modern Man."'

%' Most of us who think about life at r all are interested in books that offer | us the hope of finding and holding in our. hands the guiding thread that will ~ deliver us from the bewildering labyrinth of incoherence we airily de- £■ scribe as “modern thought.” We have,

$ of, ourselves, attempted so many ways ",. out,:;; that ~proved blind alleys or ■v, brought, us round a tedious circle to A where we started from, that we half despaired in our disappointments !■! whether there be any way out. ,-Yet we remain incurably ready to try again at any sign of likely leader- | ship.,: And Professor Levy has more Tthen won.ffie right to our hopeful at-

| ten|gh. ' :5; Towards Larger Freedom, Thi&iriew* book of his,, to be publish- * edJeSirly.inJanuary, is regarded by ;; those who have seen it in preparation 1 as “a masterpiece." When the book reaches New Zealand it will be reviewed in these ’ columns.

it would appear from some forewords of the' author that he m enseaypws ;to marshal and analyse the ' moVeffiepts ip the history of hu- | men thought and effort by which men : t have struggled towards a larger freedom and nobler social relationship to •4. « one another.

v V: ■' • |JW - . u k <’»•**• | % ' says, we study how the | causeof chinge passes from outside ■| the group to inside, arid back; and >■: the remarkable changes that follow. Social changes in history are then .1 keen tb occur in definite order. We see whither men in the mass were 1 in the past unconsciously driven, V'" 'and' with what travail they reached 4 tlieir goai. We can see where men’s ; acttons unconsciously leading today, and what travails await them V ‘if they act without understanding.

This give* us a scientific view of our | relations to others, why some | changes seem important and others uot, and hoW we can become aware 1 1 of our power to direct history in-

telligently. That gives us a practical philosophy. .

Undermining Civilisation. i Having written this phrase to draw j attention to what follows, the skulking -cynic in me asks a sneering question: |“Why shouldn’t it be undermined and | blown tip? Then we can start afresh!” |Yes, I know the mood. v • • «*■*•.. i | Christmas, as Shaw remarks, ' preaching peace and goodwill as loudly as possible to prevent our hearing ■'too terribly the noise of slaughtering guns and shattering bombs. | Jpyjeat Christian nations, England, /America, looking on while Japan vbutchers China and civil war ruthlessly desolates Spain, Meanwhile we are armed to the teeth and gasmasked: to:the eyes.

Science that should heal and nurse ihe world 'to health, threatening it daily with increasingly terrible destruction.

Civilisation indeed! In a straitjacket of armaments. But this mood is untrustworthy. It sees life unsteadily. All the time there Is a civilisation worthy of preservation and pride. And this civilisation is the fine flowering of cultivated experience. When we despise the past and deny experience we are scrabbling among the roots of culture. We are undermining civilisation.

Control or Chaos,

This is the theme and argument of a December book by David Daiches, one time Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and now Lecturer on the staff of the Chicago University. The book is entitled “Literature and Society.” Literature —books of any durable merit—is'the repository of experience. The great writers of the world are the windows, the magic casements, through which we see the age in which they lived. They cannot hide it. “However much a writer may insist that he has no practical aim, it is impossible for him not to reveal, in the degree of his quality, an insight into the mind of man. With that insight, we are given an understanding of human behaviour and its motives; and the ability to gain that understanding is essential to the control of the world in which we live.”

Professor Laski speaks of .the “admirable way in .which Mr Daiches traces his,theme through a thousai. years of our history” to a , twofold conclusion. First, that if our cultural heritage in literature is the report of our experience, the more widely its meaning is shared, the mors fully all our lives will be enriched: second, that all attempts to frustrate or suppress that heritage is a challenge to battle. Very often it is in the interests of those who hold the keys c* power to suppress records of experience that would tend to inconvenience and upset the exercise of their power. So Germany has struck one of its most deadly blows to culture and civilisation when it expelled its outstanding men of letters. Quoting Laski again:—

Th 6 gentility of Thackery, which so often defeats his realism, the retreat of Tennyson into a trite conventionalism after the earlier struggles for reality, Macauly’s easy identification of change with progress, all these are evidence of the frustrations which Hitlerite Ger- / many has elevated into l principle of social action. It is an insistence that in convenient experience may be denied by those who hold the keys of power. But there comes a point where the denial of experience becomes the decision to destroy civilisation.