UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Where Do We Go?
By PETER TOWNSEND (St. John's College, Cambridge) ONE of the most dangerous, and yet most attractive, characteristics of young British people in the years before the war was their insatiable desire for the overthrow of governments, the success of new movements in art and the eclipse of all that was conventional and stereotyped in British thought. The idealism of the Marxists, the Federalists, the anti-Imperialists, the Fabians, the Pacifists—to say nothing of the followers of Eliot and Auden, Picasso and Matisse, Epstein and Henry Moore—led to virulent developments in the arts and to tremendous enthusiasm in the causes of. political minorities.
Today this youthful idealism is hard to find. Few of our universi- ties can boast of revolutionary minorities in art or in politics, few writers are high-spirited enough to debunk the writings of those who are elderly—and famous—and few will shout " hurrah for the Soviet Union." Many men who preached Marxism or pacifism with bravado before the war are now quietly eating their words. Do we still find a leading poet declaring, " Civilisation can now only go forward by eliminating the profit-basis of production ? " In short, young intellectuals have been unwilling to play the role of the rebellious leader. They do not posseSs or desire the initiative to proclaim a particular Utopia in art, writing or politics, and their former political agitation and angry discontent has been replaced by restrained optimism or apathy, and even by blank despair.
Their acceptance of the uselessness of ideals has a complex derivation. A number of general reasons can be tentatively offered. The steady stock-piling of armaments, atomic and hydrogen bombs, has gone on relentlessly, and to some the human race seems to be threatened by " an interior urge to destruction." One cannot now lay down John Hersey's Hiroshima without realising that its whole message has been ignored. And even if the individual grasps its message he has a sense of the futility of exerting his own minute powers in an effort to affect the overwhelming size and complexity of the East-West political conflict. It seems absurd to act when the most that he can seem to do is to send a furious letter to the Prime Minister or sign vague and ineffectual petitions: Even when he confines his attention to the daisy-chains of British politics he finds independent thinkers pushed aside by the ponderous advance of the two main party machines. Most of the stalwarts who pitted themselves against these machines in the recent election, and who were respected for doing so, found themselves crushed by opposing votes, although as individuals they were often considered to have far more imposing personalities than their opponents. When competent individuals and new political doctrines fail to achieve any small success faith in the speedy reversal of social ills is apt to be blunted. It is difficult to be enthusiastic about a new move- ment if it is thwarted in its infancy and finds its leaders forsaken by the electorate.
This want of pioneering fervour is evident in most of the arts and particularly in modern poetry. There is little doubt that the obscurity in contemporary verse of which Ivor Brown has recently complained is due largely to the unsureness of direction of young poets. They sense the complexity and madness of a muddled society and can neither express clearly this madness nor discern an ideal state of things through the complexity to which they can stretch their pens. For they are aware of the failike of international peace movements and of attempts to ban the production of atomic and hydrogen bombs ; they observe the failure of political utopians and individualists ; and above all they remember the mistakes and the false hopes of- the idealists in the nineteen-thirties. Small wonder that they exhaust our vocabulary in attempting to describe their difficulties in-symbols and imagery.
As far as poetry and writing are concerned among undergraduates at the universities—here I am thinking particularly of Cambridge —this aimlessness is striking. There is no active group with a fixed idea of what they want to write and how they want to express it. A recently published poem in Cambridge puts the matter its an unmistakable form: . . . 0, we're running down hill, babe, it can't go on, Make the most of the sun.. . .
We're the last of the lost generations Holding out the fort against the hungry nations.
Soon we'll have to share their hunger And Civilisation will move to the Congo.
We're running down hill, there'll be no dawning, No morning for us.
We live on the rump of the 30s' tradition They took away their vim and they left us their diction, We'll have fun while the dollars run Diffusing culture but creating none.
0, we're running down hill, baby, hold me tight, Make the most of tonight."
Young students, poets, artists and dormant revolutionaries, havd been reduced, then, by circumstances and by example, to an uneasy subjectivism which is such an unwelcome frame of mind that many seek elsewhere for faith and for an outlet for their energies.
Some look to the Church or to philosophy. But the Church seems content to offer personal salvation and to leave the more pressing social and international problems in the hands of the politicians. This appears to be the reason why there is no sign of the deepening sense of spirituality in the universities for which Sir Walter Moberly, in his Crisis in the University, has pleaded. And if some obstinately suppose that a study of philosophy will solve all problems, they feel cheated when modern philosophers tell them that philosophy studies language and the categories of sentences. They continue to feel cheated when philosophers like John Wisdom, of Cambridge, point out that philosophy is not an idealistic system-building which spells out conclusive answers to our problems, but the curing of a mental cramp which has been induced by the fascination of certain analogies suggested by our language. Philosophy is reacting against elaborate system- making and also against the influence of the Definition model which was introduced by Russell early in this century and continued by the Logical Positivists.
Thus, among most students and young people, there remains this absence of idealism, this vague sense of purposelessness. The passion of new ideas and new crusades does not spread like wild-fire, perhaps because too many ideas and crusades have failed or fallen flat in the last twenty years, or perhaps there is no solution to some social problems. This is implied in Dr. Joad's statement that post-war undergraduates are a " generation robbed of the larkiness of youth." Joad, a master in the contemporary art of decadence, had noticed the more superficial changes among undergraduates —the loss of an aesthetic taste in wine, the lack of privilege, money and leisure, the loss of some of the sensibilities that he had cultivated when an undergraduate—and he inquired whether they were symptoms of a civilisation in decline. He was obviously wrong to consider that all the changes he noticed were losses, but he under- stood vaguely the most significant change of all when he remarked that post-war undergraduates were robbed of the fire and the "larkiness " of youth.
There is value in idealism, if only for its " larkiness " and its delusion ; and when we make occasional outrageous remarks, such as that " love is madness," that " Marxism is the salvation of man- kind," that " God can solve all our ills," that " individuality is an illusion," we are making idealistic remarks which are evidence of an anxiety we bear that will never cease, an anxiety to find the true, the definitive, the enduring. When we are told to come down to earth, to be more practical and to abandon our castles in the air, we are less likely to be disappointed in the future, but we do not have nearly so much fun. While young people are without this idealism, they are more likely to be sympathetic and matter-of-fact in manner than dogmatic, and more likely to be cautious in their beliefs, but there is less excitement and less passion, fewer sugges. five ideas, and there is always a slight danger of a rebound front unsureness into thoughtlessness and hysteria.
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