The Human Situation
By STEPHEN TOULMIN - ' It is, obviously, becoming less and less possible to accept the human situation, which is so full of misery and tragedy.' Thus an anonymous reviewer in the Listener recently. Last week Lord Hailshant looked at this despondent text from a Christian viewpoint. This week Stephen Toulmin examines it as a scientist. Next week Kathleen Nott will write as a humanist.
MELANCHOLIA has long been the occupational disease of English writers : so much so that observers have come to call it. ' the English malady.' Dr. Johnson is the great exemplar. In his eyes, the proper theme of philosophy was the vanity of human wishes, and his friend Edwards felt the need to apologise for having a more buoyant temperament—he tried hard, he said, to be a philosopher, but ' cheerfulness kept 'breaking in.' With this tradition behind us, we are accustomed to expressions of undirected gloom. They have a recurrent vogue in English literary circles, and the Edwardses of the world (like myself) get into the way of ignoring them. Yet there are times when they need answering, times when we must remind ourselves how entirely unjustified they are. What grounds, then, are there for the proposition before us ? Is it really ' less and less possible to accept' the miseries and tragedies of ' the human situation ' ? What sort of change is supposed to be making this a more and more exacting task ? It is not enough that the writer himself should be finding this harder and harder to do : he must have some reason for thinking that we others are following his example. Yet this implication, that the world is past all our bearing, would take some establishing; and, in any case, despair is hardly the rational reaction to the blows of circumstance. Alternatively, the suggestion may be that we take our misfortunes more to heart nowadays, and that the residue of accidents and misfortunes left to us—the inevitable bereavements, loss and pain—find us less prepared. In this way, the same misfortunes as our predecessors had to bear might cause that much the more misery and an onlooker might find in this an increasingly saddening spectacle. Certainly a case could be made out for this view. The loss of a son we now find a natural explanation even of near-madness (as in the film Carnet de Bal), yet Queen Anne could lose all her fourteen children before they grew up and still carry out the duties of her station. But again the moral is not one of gloom justified. If our misfortunes tend to strike us more forcibly nowadays, one clear reason is that they come, not more, but less frequently. The one view that cannot be maintained is the one the writer seems to he taking for granted—the view that the misfortunes and accidents of human life are themselves increasingly frequent and serious, to the point of becoming unbearable. One has only to think again of Queen Anne to realise how grotesque this claim would be. In the things that touch people most nearly, we are better off now, in the English-speaking countries especially, than people anywhere Shave ever been. We may forget this so long as we focus our attentions exclusively on the conditions of the most backward nations, or on the bickerings of governments—though even these seem to us especially threatening in comparison not with those of 1854 or 1754 (to say nothing of 1938), but only with the diplomatic millennium of which some had thought the United Nations held a promise. But we are able to take this outward-looking view, and get worked up about these distant troubles as we do, simply because in so many more immediate ways our lives are extraordinarily free of proper occasions for anxiety and care.
More than anything, of course, it is the progress of medicine which has brought us to this state. Blessed with a reasonable understanding of the nature of the commoner diseases, and techniques both for preventing and curing many of them, we are freed from more than we realise. The miseries of the human situation' in other centuries were a product not just of the diseases themselves but also of their unforeseeability—one had indeed to believe in a merciful Providence in order to face quietly the prospect of a plague or a Black Death, and we should need strong minds, if the fear many feel today of polio and cancer were equally in place for all diseases. But more than medicine, all the fruits of a well-ordered society and the advances of the sciences make their contribution to our peace of mind. A better economic understanding of the trade cycle makes the fear of unemployment less pressing, and its reality less terrible; while even a step forward in dynamics can relieve us of fears which our forefathers felt as real. Halley in his ' Ode to Newton ' claims for the Newtonian theory the in- tidental but important merit that it robs the stars of their `ominous' character :
Now we know The sharply veering ways of comets, once A source of dread, nor longer do we quail Beneath appearances of bearded stars.
This may seem a small thing, but it is of a piece with the rest. The centuries before the Scientific Revolution no longer look as idyllic as they did when seen through William Morris's nostalgic haze, and we, who arc largely freed from our ancestors' fears of -witchcraft, murder and pestilence, must realise how much we have to be thankful for.
What in ,heaven's name is supposed to be wrong ? Is it the miseries df the Koreans, or-of the political prisoners in Russia. or of poor Aikichi Kuboyama, dead of radiation sickness front the hydrogen bomb fall-out'? Or is it the prospect of our all being victims of the same fate '? If so, a sense of proportion is called for. We cannot be badly off if we have to look so far afield—or into a purely hypothetical future—for miseries and tragedies to blench at.
Am I advocating a return to the belief in progress ? Not to a belief in its inevitability, certainly : rather a recognition of the fact. After all, there is the world of difference between these. Plenty of people, in abandoning. a nineteenth-century faith in the upward march of history, seem to lose with it the ability to acknowledge actual improvements when they see them. No doubt there will always be a residue of tragedy and misery in our lives, some of it springing from accidents, some from clashes of personality, and about this residue we can onlY Maintain the attitude of Job. No doubt, top, ground gained in any sphere of human life can be lost again, and sometimes, has been. But this by itself is no ground for gloom: if anything it is a reason for resolve. It may be, of course, that this is what the writer really wished to convey. ' It is becoming less and less possible to accept the human situation,' he wrote p and we mistook him as meaning less and less possible to keep our spirits up in the face of situation overwhelmingly full of tragedy and misery.' Did he after all, mean something quite different ? Was he exhorting us to count our blessings, and resolve to tight that others maY enjoy them too ? Maybe what he meant was this : It is obviously becoming less and less possible to sit down under the existing human situation which, for all our past achievements, still contains so much needless and avoidable misery en' tragedy.' There would be a fine resolution, one which vv° Edwardses would hasten to support. It is also one far more justified by events than any wretched expression of despair' ,But, alas, it is an interpretation too charitable to be true'
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