YEA AND NAY
By THE RT. HON. LORD MACMILLAN
WHEN Nietzsche said that the choice lies between a yea-saying and a nay-saying to life that not altogether admirable philo- sopher propounded a penetrating truth. Never has this choice confronted us with more insistency than in these times, when we have !daily to determine our attitude to a vast proliferation of plans and projects for the rehabilitation of a shattered world. By our response we classify ourselves. To some minds the presentation of a new idea is exciting and stimulating. In other minds it evokes only a suspicious distrust. The former are all for lending their aid ; the latter are no less strenuous in opposition. The thought of a brave new world goes to the heads of some people ; others share Sir Max Beerbohm's repugnance to seeing Jerusalem built " on England's smooth and asphalt land." It is as if the physical law that action and reaction arc equal and opposite had its analogue in the mental sphere. •
This strife of spirits between the enthusiast and the sceptic is not altogether a bad thing. It is better to have convictions, positive or negative, and to be prepared to fight for them, than to eddy in the sluices of indecision or earn with Coeur de Lion the sobriquet of Richard Yea-and-Nay. Sometimes, no doubt, it is diffi- cult for human nature to accept Burke's aphorism that our antagonist is our helper. But it is true. In the heat of conflict the ore is purified of its dross. By blows on the anvil the metal is shaped. This hard doctrine may bring comfort to those who are daunted by the critical reception of their cherished enterprises. But all depends upon how the conflict is waged. There are rules of chivalry, there are conventions, for the mitigation of the asperities of intel- lectual warfare. It is when controversy disregards these rules and conventions, as it is now so apt to do, and the last ditch becomes the gutter, that it grows squalid and sordid. Especially is this so when it descends to personalities, abuse of persons instead of con- futation of theories, attribution of unworthy motives, dishonest mis- representation and all the other base weapons of the intellectual bandit.
The art of making allowances for the point of view of an opponent, of understanding its merits before attacking its defects, is of the essence of profitable debate. When the enthusiast to whom every- thing seems easy and clear exclaims in exasperation that there are no difficult problems, only difficult people, let him pause and ask himself if perchance he is not himself the difficult person. Mag- nanimity is of greater value than unanimity. The hall-mark of freedom is diversity. The real vice of Communism and Fascism, as of all totalitarian systems, is their suppression of adventurous originality. To them non-conformity is a crime. The plan of the totalitarian heaven makes no provision for many mansions, but only for uniform blocks of Council houses. If the State says " Yea," no one shall be heard to say " Nay." It insists on the sacrifice of realities to the symmetry of cherished theories. This intolerance of everything that deviates from the approved pattern means the deathblow to progress. The close association between freedom and the tolerance of diversity was long ago passionately affirmed by John Locke in his famous " Letters on Toleration," written in 1685, on the eve of-the Revolution, when he was in banishment in Holland. In his time the burning question was the toleration of diversity in religious belief and practice.
So far as this country is concerned that battle has been won, though we have seen unhappy recrudescences of religious persecu- tion of recent years on the Continent. For us the contest is now
being waged round political and economic freedom. The intolerance of the present day is concerned primarily with material rather than with spiritual things, with methods of government, with social welfare, with regulation of the activities of the individual in the conduct of his mundane affairs. Not but that there is a spiritual element here, too, for the contest ultimately relates itself to the conception of the good life and how it is to be lived. Is there to be the maximum of freedom for each to work out his own destiny, or are our lives to be regimented according to what the State thinks good for us? Are our lives to be free-flowing rivers fed from heaven and finding their own way to the sea, or are they to De canals fed by waterworks and directed to specific destinations? One thing is certain ; all parties have travelled a long way since Tom Paine, the pioneer apostle of the rights of labour, laid down that " the more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion it has for govern-
ment. . . It is but few general laws that civilised life requires." One of the strangest phenomena of an unsettled period such as that through which the world is now passing is that extreme opinions, positive and negative, are then held with a fervour and tenacity for which the general uncertainty affords no warrant. "The more doubtful the political outlook," wrote John Buchan, " the fiercer will be the dogmas which men create and contend for. . . . It is an old trait of human nature when in the mist to be very sure about its road."
It is painfully true, as a recent searcher of the human heart has said, that " disapproval occupies the greater part of our conversa- tion," but he hastens to add that " if nothing were left of which to disapprove, the salt of life would lose its savour." So mankind will go on approving and disapproving, and from the impact of opposites will emerge the practicable compromise,—" odious to passionate natures because it seems a surrender, and to intellectual natures because it seems a confusion," in Santayana's words—yet often the best solution in a work-a-day world which has always to content itself with the second-best. The eternal duality of good and evil can never be reconciled in a higher unity, and what is ultimately good and what is ultimately evil in practical affairs can never be determined either by authority or by reason. For, as Tennyson's Ancient Sage admonishes us, "nothing worthy proving can be proven, nor yet disproven," and so he bids us cling to Faith who " brightens at the clash of ' Yes' and ' No,' " and " secs the Best that glimmers through the Worst." Neither " the everlasting Nay " nor " the everlasting Yea " can be the rule of human life.
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