WHAT SHOULD WE FIGHT FOR ? y. Under Thirty Page
By ALISTAIR COOKE
[The writer, who is well known as a broadcaster and dramatic critic, is aged 29] THERE is an awkward pathos common to all European men and women of our age. Thankfully we acknowledge that, as you tell us, " life is before us," but if you will excuse us we must go about our A.R.P. If you ask any young air warden, " Who are these precautions being taken against? " he will sensibly reply," Against gas and explosives." An answer which disposes of many of the fine scruples so conscientiously distinguished in this series of articles. This oncoming war will, like any other in the past 30o years, be fought for a sloppy mess of reasons and impulses through which a fine-tooth comb would hardly separate the strands of heroism, profit, and skull-duggery, to say nothing of who's fighting whom and why. The question is, since you're going to have to fight or fold your arms in a concentration camp, what will you be fighting to live for ? So if this is about anything it is, what should we live for ? It is true that we are living a con- tingency and not a life. But the part of this truth that damns is the beautiful opening it offers a whole generation to postpone its obligation to act as skilful midwife to an era hankering to be born and which an older generation has neither the training nor the sympathy to deliver. To them who solve both the emergency, and the right to a wife and two children, with an ideology, any consistent day-to-day labour that lies outside the party programme is laziness and betrayal. If it's that group you're thinking of, there's no time for discussing the technique of the game when bad light (to say nothing of bad conscience) stopped play as long ago as 1935, the year of our Mussolini.
To learn about wise living, to discover your own values, to be honest with yourself. These are ideals that men have taken to be the very sequence of living, though history has a knack of getting in their way. So even though we must weakly study the elements of living, namely, to plaster a door to its moulding, to gag recalcitrant babies, we should not be in line with history or humanity if we did not " just the same" try our hand at the permanent ideals, with a lot of mercy asked for the word permanent.
We must necessarily start with the tatters of democracy as they lie around this isle. (Since democracy was always something of a tatterdemalion, no offence is meant.) And then ponder on the type of civilised youth most likely to make our society work under that or any other system. To one who looks back to a birth, upbringing and partial education in this country, there comes to him on a visit a gradual resettling of admiration and disrespect which he would several years ago not have thought possible. Compared with the other democracy what are the things that impress, what has been rescued to make an English status quo?
Certainly a safer and humaner right of free assembly to spout unpopular opinions, without the risk of knuckle- dusting from the hired thugs of some pouch-eyed city boss. A serenity of daily living which once looked like the bloom on British reserve but now looks more like declining energies. But still, deceptively in many of the able young, a quiet approach to thorough work ; the ability to do important work on a shoestring; an affection for "a bit of a garden" which no amused young man can belittle or blast as a true national quality. Again, the uncompromising English attitudes of an older generation, of an earlier English tradition, seem more admirable than the confused amateurism of the more radical young. The old guard (which presumably reads its Times, like Cobbett, with an open atlas) has the right to sniff at journalism which labels every foreign statesman with his Cabinet post. This same observer suddenly dropped in Lower Regent Street or St. John's Wood from another world- with other ways is neither pleased nor irritated by good and bad design in blocks of flats; it is the Regency you think back to, the achieved perfections of the eighteenth century.
This looks like reaction and I would have said so myself. But these things strike a stranger, the old rounded traditions which do not seem to be making way for anything of equivalent expertness or value.
Instead, you see around you a generation frustrated in its idealism, tending its adolescence into such offshoots as preciosity (so that it hurts to think of Pitt Prime Minister at 24), catching at fashionable enthusiasms from a world outside the war zone, where those enthusiasms—good health, technics, swing music, documentation, State education—are the rude health of new cultures but which here are doomed to become the expedient parodies of fitness campaigns, laborious gadgetry, fake exuberance, minority reports, a crust thrown to a cowed working class.
Being a journalist he cannot help but notice a Press (aside from that much-abused Times) hidebound by some vague common cause and the laziness, it may be sheer inability, to provide a thousand sequent words of foreign news. He notices, too, that there is no market for facts, no interest (which once aroused demands enormous organisation) to present day by day a self-respecting continuity of world news : in a word, a Press demoralised by learning its novelties from American tabloids instead of learning a tradition from the American Press.
For the inspired, and often kindly, amateurism he finds in daily professional practice—of especially trade, medicine, transport, education—he hardly knows where to search for roots. Perhaps it will be found that Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, has more to answer for than the English tradition would have known or yielded. For the problems and inhibitions of the under thirties may be traced to him as symbol-7-to the idea that typed a new Briton who could dispense with the human qualities (many qualities of efficiency as well as sentiment) that lay outside the concept of service and its core—insubordin- ation ; the idea that made possible the ruination of an island agriculture to retain that Empire ; in racial terms, an idea that articulated a standard of staunch principle which over the years petered out into something else and may now be met with in diffusion everywhere as pedantry in scholarship, foot- rule insularity, over-intellectual humour (especially in un- intellectual people), a literature of complaint and suburban Hamletism, and those infinitely graded table-lands of English social distinction.
This generation under thirty may not recognise itself in time. But this self-identification is essential to the casting out of those things which keep them, their children and their country from influencing a new era as different and inevitable as the Renaissance. First, he must be re-made or broken on learn- ing to become a professional. This entails the demolition of many cherished English idols : namely, to dethrone personal opinion for purposes of enquiry—I eace to abolish the system of private tutoring in education. It means—since the inven- tion of radio and movies—the end of minority culture. The end of the " gentleman " obsession. Since the invention of the dynamo, the end of regionalism or a deliberate new creation of it. It means the . . . .
An airplane trundles overhead, spotted by a searchlight in Regent's Park. It is a cynical consolation for those who think this a hectoring diagnosis. Whether I am wrong or right, the Oxford graduate and the young farmer can sit down together and on their thirtieth birthday ruefully coo- template Jefferson's " unalieanable " demand—" Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Yes, indeed. Nice work if you can get it.
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