20 SEPTEMBER 1935, Page 21

A Defence of Intellectual Freedom

By J. L. HAMMOND Katarcir used to find amusement in putting himself in the place of a cultivated Greek or Roman at the time when Conversion was a common phenomenon and imagining hoW he would have felt as his intimate friends turned, one after !mother, to this strange delusion. . For years he and they had shared the same interests, discussed the same questions, recognised the same dilemmas, into which experience and knowledge had led them." a And then quite suddenly everything was changed." " I have been saved," announced one of them and though he was never able to explain exactly what " salvation " meant, he had acquired along with it a new set of terms which replaced the old and made communi- cation impossible. He now finds himself in the situation he had often imagined when he is faced with American friends• who have turned Communist. He recognises the plight of modern civilisation; he suspects that his friends are in touch with ideas that may prove of value for its im- provement ; but he is bewildered by what he calls the " psy- chological effects of Salvation," a by the way in which the new faith renders unrecognisable:the minds which he thought he knew so well."

The anomalies and injustices of the world in which we live are so evident and provocative that what we may call the heroic or the desperate solutions, Communism arid Fascism, have at one time or another offered some attraction to all impatient and sensitive minds. Mr. Krutch in this stimulating little book explains in what sense they demand from their devotees the sacrifice not merely of their share in the material Wealth of this absurd world—a sacrifice many are quite ready to make—but their share in its culture. For European culture depends on certain values to which this new creed is as hostile as early Christianity was hostile to the culture it found in the Roman world. So devout a Christian as Gladstone argued indeed that Christianity was only saved from dealing a fatal

blow at civilisation by the power and influence of the Greek tradition which tempered its first crude austerities. It is in a sense the Greek tradition that is threatened by

these set a value on free new religions ; the' tradition which dom, on toleranCe, and on the development and exercise of disinterested reason, Mr. Krutch's book is a brilliant exposition of the part those ideas have played in Europe and of his reasons for holding 'that nothing the new religions can offer is Worth their loss. " The new religions "—because, as Mr. Kruteh says, " from the intellecftial standpoint, the really significant thing is less whether a Juan is a doctrinaire Com- munist or a doctrinaire Fascist than whether or not he has the kind of mind to which the dogmatisms and over-simplifications of either are congenial." talTkhae theologians of the new religions argue that though we great deal of freedom in this European society, there tsar never in point of fact a great deal of it outside the classes that enjoyed property and leisure. Nobody will deny the large element of truth in this criticism. But there is all the differ- ence between a world in which the reformers want to extend What freedom there is and.one in which they deny that freedom is a good. Mr. Krutch says justly that the idea of freedom and the sensation of being free has played so large a part in the mental and emotional fife of the European man that we can hardly imagine him without them. A man may have the greatest horror of some of the conditions of life in England or France and yet feel that. the difference between living in a country where discussion is allowed and one where it is for- bidden is the difference between an atmosphere where he can breathe and . one : where he :cannot, For . ultimately - the Was Europe a Success ? By Joseph Wood Kruteh. With an introduction' by C. E. M. Joad. (medium. 3s. 6.1.) difference between a State governed by one of the new religions and the old European society is that in the new religions the State is everything and man has ceased to be even on paper, in Aristotle's phrase, an end in himself. So far is this carried that. as Mr. Krutch points out, the new States are the only States in which a citizen is not allowed to leave his country. " Neither in its best days no in its worst, has the United States ever found it necessary to do anything of the sort.. Surely it is an odd sort of Utopia which finds it neecessary to lock its. citizens in every night."

Some will argue that Communism only demands the sus- pension of freedom whilsttoitisneese. This anddinetilpialet afterwards it will practise tolerance. of Phocylides who determined first to make a competence and then to practise virtue. History provides many examples of men who have tried this plan and come to grief ; men like

success,sliherelapsedire com- petence, with disastrous Napoleon the Third and Cecil Rhodes who, when they were practising virtue with considerableertahbelyhad aerinuidreddene

into the methods by which

i sresults. American Can o communist u nist friends escape leads oo fate ? But his study of u h s

Mr. Krutch to the conclusion that there is no place for tolerance in the future any more than in the present. Tolerance is out of place when you are struggloinght re

the perfectit. tStapt biunttihtaits equally out of place when you ftrheeCohmurto h daos oalnw lyay ws h eaatile is State " everything will be tolerated-except error, and man will at last enjoy that freedom whthicehed

the true freedom, namely, right." The real issue is not between those who would welcome and those who would resist an experiment to organise society on the common ownership of wealth, but between those who insist on regarding a Communist State with the same detachment as they regard any other and those who regard it as the early Christians regarded the Church.

For it is this dogmatic certainty that distinguishes the com- munist mind from the liberal. The man who thinks that he is going to make a better. world will allow discussion and criticism and.believe that they help him to make that better world. The man who is convinced that he is going to make a perfect world' regards tolerance as it was regarded 'by the Church in the days of persecution. Tolerance was admirable until the final and absolute truth had been discovered and then ' it became a crime.' And, as Mr. Kruteh points out, the man who has this fervent and dogmatic confidence thinks of any activity that is not directly aiming at the creation or the service of this perfect State as wicked waste. We saw in the War how easily men and women come to demand the concen- tration of the whole life of a society on a particular purpose. So under this impression great art is dismissed as a bourgeois irrelevance just as• once it was dismissed as Pagan falsehobd implying a callous want of sympathy with the victims of the world's injustice. The only art that is sanctioned by this strict conscience is propagandist. There will be no more. scandals like that of Gibbon writing in a world that was suffering every kind of injustice of which his history took no notice.

Mr. Krutch's book is not a survey or examination of conditions 'in Russia. If it were so regarded it would be superficial and incomplete. It is a defence of the values that European society has created with great effort and a struggle against a temper that would destroy them. Every earnest man has in his'. nature the making of a 'Tertullian, and it is Tertullian in this new form who is the danger. Mr. Kruteh writes sometimes with passion, often with wit. " Some Rome," he reminds his American communist friends, " is always burning but that does not make every fiddler a Nero."