BOOKS
Problems of Orthodoxy
• By MAURICE COWLING
WHATEVER the intentions of their founders or professions of their present managers (and despite the existence of Oxford and
Cambridge colleges), most English universities are in effect 'secular' universities. 'Secular'
in this context may mean either of two things. It May mean that teaching faculties, avoiding per- suasion to moral, ethical or religious commitment, should, as teaching faculties, commit themselves only to explanation of whatever subject-matter they isolate for consideration; or it may mean commitment, open or concealed, to those forms of secular humanism which are designed to supersede Christianity. In some subjects (not all of them 'scientific') confusion between the two intentions has never been acute: in others it has sometimes been difficult to be sure when one has merged into the other. At some stages in the development of an academic subject, the belief that the subject itself has special capability for iraproving human conduct in the area it studies can be stimulating • (if academically irrelevant): at other stages reluctance to disturb established practical 'truths' may inhibit academic inventiveness. The intention to remove practical commitment from the humanities is possible in a society where moral and religious conflict is not fundamental: the possibility presses where fundamental commitments are in conflict and Where the educational system is supposed, in 8eneral, to be (if one may use a word rich ill ambiguity) 'undenominational.' The pro- cess by which teaching faculties have adopted this character in England is important to the historian of thought. Whether the process is desirable or not, it has provided students of Morality with a point of detachment-in-the-midst- of-conflict which is, methodologically, of great significance.
It is not necessarily desirable, from a prac- tical point of view, that these studies should be Pursued in an academic way : if the academic Pursuit is possible only in conditions of ideological conflict, it may be better that they should not be pursued at all. A plural society would not necessarily be the best one to establish If it did not exist already: good might be clone by trying to remove ideological conflict. Nevertheless, in England conflict exists, and it might be expected that teachers of these subjects Would make the most of it while it lasts: In order t° do so, however, they need to recognise conflict when they see it. This some of them seem ill-equipped to do, partly because of a reluctance to recognise the possible rightness of Pracii,a1 commitments other than their own, Partly because of the assumption that commitments Ire in some way validated by academic argument. a no area more than in political philosophy Is it so easy to feel at the present time that explanatory doctrines are covers to insinuate the resentful humanism of their exponents: nowhere aces one so readily sense a continuing decision so turn lecture-rooms into chapels, daises into pulpits, explanatory statements into lay sermons.
It does not matter whether the philosophical doc- trine is empiricist or idealist, or whether the pro- cedure is analytical or not: the position in 1964 (whatever it was in 1864) is that secular humanism is a prevailing orthodoxy in political and sociological studies. It was not in- evitable that English universities should become secular institutions in the explanatory sense, but, if they are to be so (and few teachers seem willing to argue articulately that they should not be) then the explanatory function must be detached from the prevailing secular humanism as much as it has over the last hundred years been detached from Christianity itself.
The merit of Professor Richter's honest (if sometimes turgid) book* is that he is conscious of these problems and sets Green's writing in their framework. Green taught at a period of great importance in the development of modern studies : he was in part responsible for the im- pression some of their professors leave that they are devotees of a religion. Philosophical idealists are not necessarily subject to this confusion (any more than empiricists are necessarily immune from it), but it was in an idealist form that Green propagated attitudes which have survived the dilapidation of his philosophical position. Green's attempt to accommodate .Christ to Socrates (if not Socrates to Christ) and his exten- sive conception of the professional function of philosophy combined with powerful criticisms of the philosophical adequacy and practical effects of empirical hedonism to produce a religio- philosophical conflation which was as philosophi- cally comprehensive, as ethically ambitious and as politically insinuating as Mill's.
Green made much of the explanatory function of philosophy, but there is, in him, as in other philosophers, a disjunction between the explana- tory intention and the moral injunctions which emerge. The fundamental characteristic of man's nature, in Green's philosophy, is capacity for participation in the 'eternal consciousness.' Participation in the eternal consciousness is both an explanation of man's nature and an account of the motivations by which he should be moved. The process by which Green moves from the general doctrine (which occu- pies part of Prolegomena to Ethics) to the moral and political injunctions (expounded at greatest length in Principles of Political Obli- gation) is complicated but unconvincing. Green is not, in general, a ridiculous thinker, but there are slippery elisions in his thinking (especially his political thinking) which, when scrutinised closely. are ridiculous. A sense of the ridiculous in thought is an 'essential item in the equipment of any historian of thought. Professor Richter ‘+inuld have added to the value of his work if he • run POLITICS OF CONSCIENCE: T. H. GREEN AND HIS AGE. By Melvin Richter. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 500 t GOVERNMENT ACTION AND MORALITY IN THE DEMOCRATIC STATE. By R. S. Downie. (Macmillan, 21s).
had been more sharply suspicious of the philo- sophical conjuring-trick which translated partici- pation in the eternal consciousness into the slogans and public persons of Gladstone and Bright.
Mr. Downie's Gorernnient Action and Morality in the Democratic Statet is a defensive attempt to clarify and justify the principles by which contemporary Liberal-democrats justify 'the moral judgments they pass on government ac- tion.' He admits that the system he is describing `cannot be identified with the actual moral and political tradition in Britain or in any other given country.' Nor, rather innocently, does he pretend to justify this body of judgments by connecting it with a metaphysical system. Where domestic politics are concerned he is doing no more than suggest 'the principles which I believe to be im- plicit in the moral judgments we pass on govern- ment action,' though in foreign policy he is 'concerned mainly with recommending an ideal which I believe to be implicit in our moral out- look at the moment.'
In spite of the clarity of parts of his writing, Mr. Downie is not easy to read. His political illustrations display a naïveté which only politi- cal scientists seem capable of (e.g., 'there is generally moral approval when a government de- cides to discover the views of the electorate on an issue by appointing a Royal Commission. But moral indignation results when the government, having discovered the views of the electorate, refuses to implement them'). Nevertheless, he is making two points of importance: he is saying that all action is moral action (political action included) and that governments, so far from being merely the harmonisers or pursuers of in- terests, act also as moral intermediaries, giving political body to the aspirations and ideals of their peoples. In saying this he is convincing. It is not the case that some actions are morally grounded and others not. All action is under judgment, political action as much as any other. Governments are not just harmonisers of •in- terests; they do embody the moral aspirations of their peoples. The difficulties about Mr. Downie are threefold. First, he does not see that from his account of the nature of moral action, a Liberal- democratic polity does not necessarily follow. Secondly, by sketching what is effectively a morality of intention, he implies an unduly narrow conception of social good.
Thirdly, Mr. Downie supposes that, because all political thinking goes on in a tradition, one task of philosophy is to clarify and justify the way of thinking embodied in the tradition to which the philosopher belongs. This would be reasonable if Mr. Downie were writing about a tradition of philosophical thinking, but the Liberal-democratic is not a tradition of philosophical thinking. It is either a tradition of political persuasion or (in Mr. Downie's hands) a school of humanistic virtue. Government Action and Morality is a con- fessional proclamation of liberal pieties: as such it has merit. At the risk of seeming uncouth, however, or a danger to the profession of politi- cal philosophy, one must repeat that political philosophy should be thought to begin, not by clarifying a tradition of moral or political prac- tice, but by pursuing the implications of the fact that differing traditions of practice are every- where in conflict. Mr. Downie knows this per- fectly well, but does not understand its signifi- cance. The 'truth' that should be written on his heart and the hearts of all political philosophers is not that the good should be willed or justice done -for we are all in favour of justice—but that conceptions of good are many.
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