Morality

Society's lost anchors

John Linklater

Successive paternalistic post-war governments have been conducting the biggest and most costly experiment in benevolent permissiveness that has ever been conceived. By whichever criteria we now assess society after more than a quarter of a century, the experiment has failed: society is in a mess. Never have we faced a crime wave with a higher proportion of killing, rape, robbery with violence and other offences against the person in which violence is itself the motive, while financial gain is negligible. Analysis of Home Office statistics shows that this type of crime is increasing annually, even against any general trend. Vandalism has reached an unprecedented peak; football crowds have become metamorphosed into savage, lawless mobs; university riots can no longer be controlled without police squads. Even schoolchildren physically attack their teachers: 1,500 cases were reported last year. The picture is one of mounting, aggressive, lawless frustration. Youth exploits the welfare state while rejecting it, in communes of dropouts, in massive drug taking, in growing numbers of young suicides and in tribal gangs of skinheads and 'Hell's Angels.' The promiscuity rate is rising, and more obscene pornography is being published more openly. National morale was never so low, nor patriotism so publicly denigrated. The relentlessly increasing incidence of mental illness already forms half of the workload of the general practitioner, notwithstanding that the psychiatric out-patient departments and mental hospital wards are full to overflowing. Some 400 British trained doctors are emigrating annually. Each of these phenomena may be accounted for individually, but they have virtually all arisen within the period of the social experiment, and all of them present common features of aimless, discontented frustration and despair. It is therefore reasonable to seek a common aetiology by analysing the philosophical background of the 'permissive society' and welfare state. The first anchor of traditional civilisation began to drag when the late nineteenth-cen tury scientific and technological explosion seemed to explain away the need to postulate a God. A hidebound church failed to perceive that Darwinists were merely providing evidence that the sages of old must have received a divine revelation when they wrote the order of creation in Genesis, and that their postulated élan vital was an acceptable alternative description of God breathing his own likeness into the clay of sub-man. Without a god to sanctify human life and to declare absolute values, however, the concept of the sanctity of life stood in danger, and the way was open to challenge the moral code. There was no obvious logical impediment to the construction of an arbitrary morality. Nothing was sacrosanct. The sights were set for materialistic hedonism. The second anchor of civilisation is the doctrine of individual responsibility and ireedom of will. The whole structure of the penal code and law depends upon it. This anchor was lost in a storm which arose when Sigmund Freud described patterns of mental function. Freud's shrewd insight into unconscious thought as the deep, motivating drive, welling up from the id, is now fully accepted. His interpretation of dreams and of slips of the tongue, and such Freudian mechanisms as repression, symbolism and sublimation, are all, now, part and parcel of everyday thinking. The tragedy is that a new and unjustified philosophy was extrapolated from Freud's discoveries. The followers of Freud went further than their master. They accepted the pathogenic nature of unmanageable stress in infancy, such as a penis-tweaking nanny, and postulated that all behaviour might be equally beyond control. They understood voluntary action rather as an intricate, pre-determined reflex arc, and denied true freedom of will. This was the philosophy of determinism. Determinism achieved wide, popular appeal. It had a profound effect upon the thinking of the western world. It became fashionable to give medical names to crimes and treat them as diseases, and this led to a softening of conditions in prisons, where the tone became corrective rather than deterrent. Confusion between beneficial, evolutionary stress and unnatural, pathogenic stress placed any stress in the role of the devil. Flogging and caning were thus abolished as harmful, and we began to identify with the criminal rather than with his victim. By as much as Freud had been rejected with enraged, uncomprehending contempt by his earlier, contemporary society, so now remaining equally misunderstood and misinterpreted, did he elicit adulation. Freud was enthroned in the seat of judgement fronl

which God had been displaced by the discovery of atoms. But Freud was a father

figure with a difference: he went one better than God. It was no longer necessary to repent, nor to make amends, nor, even, to undertake not to sin again. Explanation was enough. Sin itself had ceased to exist. The 'permissive society' had been launched. The third main anchor of civilisation was lost in confusion over the pecking order. Man

is an evolutionary animal: men cannot be

equal. The evidence of our eyes, and all past experience, tells us that they are not equal.

Before the Christian era, the idea of a literal,

total equality of man with man would either have been incomprehensible, or laughably ridiculous. The doctrine of equality sprang from a distortion of Christian precepts, and is a cynical revival of the Millennial Heresy. Jesus taught that, in the eyes of God, and only in the eyes of God, all men have an equal

expectation of ultimate mercy, justice and

love, depending only upon their effort to obey his laws. We have properly accepted this into our legal code as the doctrine of the equality of all men before blind justice. Jesus did not teach that men were, or should be, equal in

each other's eyes, and he left us the parable of the talents to reinforce the point. Mahatma Gandhi endorsed the concept in his memor

able proposition that man has no rights what soever, save those that he earns by his own responsible behaviour. Responsibility is meaningless to the determinist, however, who thus dwells exclusively upon his rights. He dismisses Christ, yet perversely retains his misinterpretation of Christian equality, taken out of the context in which it is meaningful. The egalitarian socialist therefore defies evolution. He denies a pecking order. The welfare state experiment was initiated upon this haphazard basis, and widely supported by all sections of the community and by all political parties alike. Society has, since then, become increasingly non-competitive, cushioned, equal, all-found and all-decided. By as much as we come closer to the coveted ideal, however, we find paradoxical signs of increasing rejection and discontent, especially among young people who have been brought

uP within this system. The basic drive of all living things is survival, to reproduce and to perpetuate the species. Offspring that happen to be born with mental or physical characteristics that give them an advantage, tend to survive more successfully and to breed more freely and, thus, to transmit the advantage to greater numbers of progeny. In the course of genera tions, most of the progeny will be born with most of the advantages. The race will have become better adapted. The whole concept of evolution depends upon the fact that offspring are similar to their parents, but never exactly the same. The principle applies equally to the specific, at first accidental, interconnections of nerve cells in the brain cortex, which will facilitate certain thought patterns and inhibit others. A man who happens to be born with a slight variation of brain structure that enables him, more easily than others, to grasp the values, rnorals, taboos and intellectual processes of his society, is more likely to succeed, and transmit the variation to the next generation. In the course of time, most of the young will have most of the common, most valuable thought patterns already laid down in their genetic instructions at conception, and will be born with them as their inescapable inheri tance. They will have a flying start, and civilisation will reach greater heights. The cubic capacity of the cranial vault has doubled, since the dawn of man, and the theorems of Euclid, which were the height of abtruse intellectuality in his day, can now be understood by the average boy of seven. The Mental age of the average adult is slowly nsing with each succeeding generation. Certain responses and thought patterns have a high survival value, and have been repeatedly tested and reinforced. Stress, for example, was survived in a hostile environment by every one of our ancestors, at least for long enough to breed. Those who most enjoyed their hard life, tended to survive the best. In the course of evolution, therefore, Most of us have come to enjoy the piquancy Of natural stress situations.

. We have also come to be governed inexorably by the three primordial external stimuli. These are a real reward for successful effort, a real interest in the task, which may be the reward, and a real fear of failure. These comprise the universal motivating principle of the carrot and the stick. Our environment has always contained these stimuli, and we have become adapted to them. Their continued Presence constitutes the very spice of life. All our basic characteristics have been Slowly, stage by stage, by trial and error, thus selected. If primitive man had ceased to compete with primitive man, there would have been no evolutionary selection for the intellect, linguistic ability and dexterity upon Which civilisation itself depends. The interdependent, non-competitive relationships between man, woman and children within the family had great survival value, and led to family loyalty. The feeling that it was good to Prefer and to defend one's own tribe, similarly had survival value. This is the evolutionary basis for altruism and patriotism. Patriotism thus cannot exist without discrimination.

The spoon-feeding, cossetting and limited incentives of a welfare state conflict with evolutionary need and produce widespread frustration. Freedom from want and fear is a reasonable and charitable political objective Provided that it is not taken to such a point that it destroys the instinctive sense of a Meaningful life. It is now known, and widely known, that the idle layabout may be paid at a higher effective rate for doing nothing, than a man who is working a full week. This sort of situation was well understood, both by Huxley and by Orwell. Each of them constructed a different species of social nightmare but they both, nevertheless, agreed on one striking common feature. Man, as we know him, cannot tolerate the absence of evolutionary competition.

The psychological correlates of the inherited interconnections of nerve cells in the brain explain this more clearly. The geneticist might refer to the structural pattern of the cells as a phyletic engram, but they equally constitute the source of the deep unconscious drive that Freud described as the id. Jung refers to those that break through commonly into dreams, and which set the pattern for much 'symbolic play in childhood, as the archetypes, but he did not have the benefit of modern ethological and neurophysiological research which would have given him a greater insight into their ubiquitous range and physical structure.

Archetypes thus constitute the racial memories upon which all subsequent individual thought is built, and which, by knowing the rules of the environment, effectively anticipate probable consequences. The philosophy of the welfare state and 'permissive society' clearly conflicts with our archetypal inheritance. This accounts, acceptably, for our social malaise, but does not explain why such a rash social experiment has been so enthusiastically supported.

Archetypes are crystallised by dogmatic instruction in childhood when we learn values, and they are refined and rationalised during higher education. We perceive the dim foreknowledge that archetypes provide, as a sense of purpose, and of right and wrong. Where the brain cortex is simple, or unprogrammed, the archetypes are vivid, as in a cuddly kitten which explodes into a hissing, spitting crackle at the first sight of a dog. The archetypes are thus equated with instinct, and are strongest in our earliest years but, however much we learn, facts are always slotted into the preexisting, inherited pattern, which is thus the mainspring of our being.

Most mammals mature physically and mentally at about the same time. The mind of man, having more to learn, matures more slowly than his body. Man has, therefore, evolved a mechanism which protects him from pointless, early sexuality within the family group, and which thus has survival value. This is the inhibitory phase, or latency, which allows him to sublimate his exploratory, promiscuous, sexual urge in an intellectual and moral direction, by forward thinking about adventures, and in symbolic play. He thus develops his higher, intellectual abilities and unique sense of long-term aim, and becomes what has been so aptly described as the inner-directed man.

A child in latency must be given a baseline of firm moral values that coincide with archetypal expectation, if he is not to feel disorientated. The progressive educationalist, however, sets out, disingenuously, to create the amoral equality which he postulates. He sets out to equalise, because all men are equal, or should be, and so produces precisely those youngsters who now reject society bitterly. They escape into desperate drug addiction, and create their own primitive moral codes, living in gangs and tribal communes, performing blood rites, and thumping jungle music. They are acting out a sad recapituation of civilisation, searching for the meaning that their education has failed to instil. They are resentful, because they feel, instinctively, that they have been deprived. When nothing is firm, or secure, in childhood, there is nothing to reject at adolescence. The adolescent child should throw off the yoke of its extended dependence by rejecting traditional values and taboos, and testing them for himself. Adolescence is the age of dubious strangers welcomed as friends, of crazy ideas, of money-wasting schemes, of a feeling of general equality with manhood and of eventual return to a line of conduct similar to that of the parents: Adolescent rebellion permits each generation to adapt and mould society. The collective thinking of a population

reflects the average mental age of its adults, and is the collective mental age of that population. It is not related to the degree of culture, nor to the average chronological age of the total population. The mental age of the average Victorian stopped increasing at twelve years. Victorian society behaved like a child in latency, when sexuality makes little outward, unsublimated appearance. This is why they rejected Freud with rage, whereas our society, with an average adult mental age of perhaps fifteen, in it collective early adolescence, acclaims him widely.

We can now see the reason for which the unworkable and undesirable doctrines of the welfare state and 'permissive society' received such enthusiastic support. They were new and egalitarian, the very stuff of adolescence.

Collective adolescence also accounts for the widespread, unnecessarily vehement, often quite irrational, rejection of cherished traditional values, as well as for the intense public pre-occupation with sex, and for the zest with which apparently sane people are destroying the latency period of schoolchildren. Many adolescents, when they discover the facts Of life, feel an irresistible urge to rush off and shock their kid brothers and sisters.

This is, in fact, the underlying common cause of the paradox of the welfare state. Marxists and communists are certainly exploiting and exacerbating our unrest as professional agitators in schools, universities and industry but, without the phenomenon of collective adolescence, the custodians of tradition could have stood firm. The church, itself, is drenched by the wave of permissiveness. Senior prelates urge Christians to pray for the "equal distribution of wealth" instead of fighting.to the death to preserve the sanctity of life. Bishops are sponsoring contraceptives when they ought to be condemning pornography. Mass adolescence also explains the sloppy tolerance which allows humanist minority groups to control television propaganda, and why we shut our eyes to ruthless, clandestine television censorship. It also explains why, when Mr Wilson went too far, and we turned to Mr Heath for respite in 1970, the Conservative leader cast his mandate overboard and felt compelled by habit of pragmatism, to slide even further into a trendy, egalitarian pornography.

There is no historical precedent for -the problems of leadership of a traditional nation in collective adolescence. Britain is first in the firld. The nation can only choose the correct course if the custodians of traditional values eschew pragmatic expediency and remain true to those values. We cannot appeal blindly, in the name of tradition and taboo, however, because it is these, precisely, which must be rejected, tested and proved, but we can invoke Didactic Integrative Rationalism, which is firmly based on the nature of man and on the inescapable archetypes that he carries. We can thus demonstrate that the progressive, egalitarian policies of theoretical socialism are based only upon an adolescent pipe-dream of what man ought to be like, Didactic Integrative Rationalism will allow US to derive both a rational new morality and a conservative political policy. We cannot yet know how a constitutional monarchy will govern itself in its maturity, when the average adult mental age is twenty, but the prospect must sustain our hope. Many standards overthrown today will be seen in a new light tomorrow. The cult of the permissive layabout of 1970 will swing over to the cult of the arch-prude of 1990. The responsible citizen must guide, and save what he can, while society oscillates between extremes, as it emerges from its stable infancy towards those broad horizons where Britain may again lead the world in the wisdom and strength of her stable maturity.

Dr John Linklater is the medical correspondent of The Spectator