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LIVING IN THE FUTURE

By C. H. PALMER (London School of Economics) "Be not solicitous, therefore, saying: What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewith shall we be clothed ? for after all these things do the heathens seek."

ND twenty centuries later we still have not learnt the lesson.

Our every thought, our every action, is oriented to our future welfare, not our present. We are not merely heathens, but Philistines. It needs an effort for us to live in the moment, and meanwhile our creative spirit atrophies.

If we do not believe that unhappiness is natural, how did this attitude arise ? Turn first to the Renaissance. Did the Church inculcate in its followers its founder's injunction to take no thought for the morrow ? For answer look at Jacob Burckhardt's survey of the Renaissance in Italy. Though the traditional beliefs of the Church were being challenged by the newfound Greek and Latin learning, the atmosphere remained Catholic. The general mental climate Burckhardt describes has absent from it ' that calculation of future enjoyment against present abstinence, with the scales always weighted in favour of the future, which is such an integral part of our own.

The change seems to have come with the Reformation. Contrast the tone of the following extracts—one a verse from Burckhardt, attributed to Lorenzo the Magnificent, the other Professor R. H. Tawney's description in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism of the prospect facing the devout Puritan.

" Quan'e bella giovinezza Che si fugge tuttavia !

Chi vuol esser hero, sia : Di doman non c'e certezza."

The warmth and joie-de-vivre of this may well be contrasted with "Through the windows of his soul the Puritan, unless a poet or a saint, looks on a landscape touched by no breath of spring. What he sees is a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness, rolling its snow-clad leagues towards the grave—a wilderness, to be subdued with aching lirrks beneath solitary stars."

Tawncy has told us how the Puritan ethos drove men to find assurance of divine reward in worldly success; how Puritan asceticism resulted in a constant reinvestment of the fruits of one's labours. All that mattered to the Puritan was the increase of wealth, for this meant that he was acceptable to God and all was well. He was working and investing, not to enjoy this life, but to receive signs that he would enjoy the next.

The elimination of the intermediary between God and man, the father confessor, probably helped considerably in the formation of the Puritan mentality. By depriving him of any consolation, of any relief for his feelings of guilt, it made him avid for the success that would mean that he was one of the elect. What has not frequently been stressed, however, is that it resulted in a radically different focus of vision. The Catholic's actions received a regular review in the confessional. Here he was fitted for entry into the next life, and from this point of view it assumed an equal importance with the Last Judgement. His sights were fixed, so to speak, on points within his lifetime. To the Protestant of whatever persuasion, however, what was important was the Last Judgement. His stock- taking only came at the end of his life, or rather out of it. His eyes were focused on a point beyond the horizon—and such points have a way of remaining in that position. Having removed all enjoyment from this-present life, he compensated by placing it all in the next and living only for that.

The Puritan went ; his attitude remained. Abstention in the heyday of sapitalism was not suffered in order to produce signs of Divine favour so much as later wealth. The future in terms of which present suffering was justified was not a celestial, but a terrestrial, one. The focus was still fixed beyond the horizon, but there were now other rationalisations. We know how the increased wealth of industrialisation accrued to the few as a result of a rigged market ; how the many were forced to save, willv-nilly. The whole system was justified, and is even now justified, in terms of rises in the standard of living, which admittedly would not have taken place without the savings. It was too painful to alter one's focus, so one rationalised, one produced statistics of rises in real wages. Whatever happened, the belief in the future was not to be shaken. Happiness, or even the mere assent of those most concerned, has never been considered. Power and a belief in one's omniscience have always been highly correlated.

Essentially an outgrowth of capitalism, the Communist creed has always borne the marks of its birth, and chief among these the belief in the future justifying the present. Let us go back to our Puritan. Surely if the mark of Divine grace was worldly success, did it matter very much how success was attained ? Did the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation, with their belief in the end justifying the means, do any more than accept the new "ethic " ? And are we surprised if the capitalist entrepreneurs rationalised their lack of ethics in the means they used by such words as "labour," "factors of production" and the like ? Communism took this attitude over lock, stock and barrel. The future will justify whatever you do provided it is successful. You vote the Nazi Party into power if you believe that this will help to bring about the future you like. That a few millions are oppressed, tortured and killed is irrelevant ; the future will justify your actions. You obstruct Marshall aid even if by so doing you inflict misery ; the future will justify your actions.

And when a Communist Party does seize power, one wonders whether the bug of futurism has not bitten it so hard that the idea of actually living in the moment is anathema. Are large-scale investments actually made to increase the standard of living, or are they the result of an unconscious attitude that it is good to invest, it is bad to consume ? Else why the perpetual postponement of an increase in consumable goods, the eternal diversion of resources into heavy industry ? That large-scale plants also make it easier to organise the workers is no doubt an added attraction, but it may be doubted if the cause is anything so rational.

This system of perpetual postponement, of ceaseless procrasti- nation, never seems to have been accepted by the mass of the people. The more control of their own affairs they have the greater preference they have for living in the moment. Not for them the endless march to the point beyond the horizon. Witness the decline in saving now that we have greater equality of incomes in this country. Those who always knew best deplore it—what of the future ?—but those most intimately concerned seem strangely unheeding. Are they now less happy for it ? Will they be less happy if the standard of living does fall, provided that it falls equally for all ?

Witnessing this, one breathes a sigh of relief. Who knows how much suffering, how many crimes, how much callousness has been the result of the belief in the future—even the future of "the people " who, whenever they were not oppressed by a minority, have always borne witness to their intuition that to live in any period but the present is never to live at all 1 The attitude is still with us ; this is not in the nature of a joyful epitaph. We arc, after all, living on a promise of future performance, and we douse the coloured lights in Trafalgar Square for fear of prejudicing it. But the attitude is passing, slowly but surely. By living in the present we will make it less bleak, and the necessity for living in the future will grow less urgent.

In that sphere where man is most himself, the sphere of creative thought, is it not a miracle that we are still able sometimes to think creatively when our upbringing and all the social pressures that impinge on us would have us think exclusively of the morrow ? The arts flourished under the Medici ; the same cannot be said either of the Puritans or the Victorians. By our standards the men of the Renaissance were both poverty- and class-ridden. We are less poor ; we still have classes ; we have lost the creativity. It may be obscurantist to talk about happiness—it is so much easier to use the phrase "standard of living "—but if our real aim is to make life tolerable we can aver that to give people the chance of being creative is immeasurably to increase their chance of happi- ness. And it does seem that in order to be creative we may have to cure ourselves of our obsession with a "rising standard of living." Which shall we choose ?