To Knowledge through Humility Feb 16 1964
One day during this last week, a number of people appeared in the TV program “Tonight”, being interviewed in the town of Thetford in Norfolk. It is proposed to set up in that town a statue of Tom Paine, who was born there in 1737, and these ordinary inhabitants of the town were being asked whether they approved of this and of the money being spent on it. I should say first that Tom Paine was a Quaker of an original and independent mind who wrote two famous books, The Right’s of Man and The Age of Reason. He lived an adventurous and often unhappy life, much of it spent in America and some of it in France. He encouraged the Americans in their struggle for independence from Britain and he approved of the French Revolution, but it spite of his enthusiasms he never stopped thinking for himself. He was elected to the French Convention but was not afraid to criticise Robespierre – with the result that he was sentenced to death and only escaped the guillotine by accident. He is thought of as one of the great inspirers of democratic, radical, revolutionary thinking, and his books are still read today.
Now these interviews in Thetford were especially interesting for one thing: the extraordinary pride of opinion shown by nearly everyone. Most of them said they were not in favour of the statue. They said NO with snapping of the mouth and a clenching of the teeth. They were certain that they knew all about Tom Paine and that their own opinions were the only right opinions. They would never change them, for the simple reason that they were RIGHT, unassailably right.
It is this attitude of mind that I want to talk about. Can we ever know that we are right? Have we ever got a right to an opinion that we can firmly stick to? About some things, yes. I know there is a near square oak table in the hall. If you dispute this fact I shall offer to go there with you and show you it, and if you doubt that it is oak we might even go down to the wood, cut out of bits of oak, ash, sycamore and birch trees, plane the bits in the workshops and then compare them with the surface of that table.
But there are other things about which I may be certain yet mistaken. Lately I have noticed that I have several times misread a word. I have misread the word because it was like another word that had been very much in my mind. There was an amusing article in, I think, the Observer a few weeks ago, showing how we often misread headlines in this way, with very comical results. So we can all suffer from illusions. We can believe things to be so when they aren’t so at all. We can see things that are not there. And we can believe that other people have seen things with the same certainty as if we had seen the things ourselves. One of the most famous instances of this occurred in the First World War. At a time when it was going hard with us on the Western Front, there was circulated a rumour that Russia was sending us troops to reinforce our armies. These were being sent across the North Sea to Scotland and through Britain by train. I remember distinctly – a boy at the time – being told authoritatively of these reinforcements; and they must have been Russians because they had snow on their boots. I remember walking under a railway bridge near Clapham Junction, looking up and wondering whether the Russians had been in any of the trains I’d seen pass across the bridge.
We all like to think that we arrive at our opinions by the most careful reasoning and therefore we must be right. That of course can’t be true always because there are so many conflicting opinions in the world, and even in a school that many people are bound to be wrong. If some views are true, others must be false, however strongly they are held.
What we have to recognise is that everyone of us is prejudiced, yes, every single one of us. What that means is that each one of us tends, because of the previous experience, and especially because of our feelings, to believe one view rather than another. All of us to some extent believe what we want [to] believe, and it involves quite a rigorous self-discipline to catch ourselves out doing this and stop it. A boy or girl who has had to listen to lectures about God from a person who claims to be religious but is in fact a hypocrite will ever after tend to disbelieve in God. And there has been so much hypocrisy in religion that there is a widespread tendency to disbelieve in God for this very reason. But it is not a good reason; it is not a reason at all. Equally a child brought up by very intellectual arguing parents who don’t show him much love will perhaps tend to believe in God, because even an imaginary loving God is better that an unloving critical, hair-splitting father. But that’s not a sound reason either.
So you have to recognise that the way you deal with the ideas offered to you in discussion will depend greatly on what you’ve been through and upon all sorts of unconscious tendencies in you – tendencies that you don’t know you’ve got.
All this makes discussion difficult. When Jim is arguing with Joe is isn’t a straightforward fight. Jim is battling with an unseen antagonist in Joe and Joe is fighting an unseen enemy in Jim. People lose their tempers in argument for precisely this reason – there’s something they can’t come to terms with in the other person, something that is not his words or his argument; and this is very irritating.
There’s yet another difficulty that may turn up in discussion; it is one that sometimes makes me angry. If a person joins some movement or organisation, political party or church, and becomes devoted to it, he can no longer be simply himself in a discussion. He’s got to say something, believe something, because the organisation requires it. In the thirties I was in touch with many communists and I sympathised with their desire to change society to that such horrors as unemployment and malnutrition might be got rid of. But nearly always when I got into discussion with a communist I began to feel that I was not discussing the matter with him but with karl Marx or Lenin. Karl Marx and Lenin are both dead, they couldn’t listen to what I was saying; so they couldn’t respond to my argument. There was, in fact, no discussion; there was simply a flat statement of unchanging opinion.
I mustn’t let you suppose that this happens only in political arguments. It happens very much in religious discussion, when it is with people belonging to a very authoritative or dogmatic church or organisation. Sometimes – though by no means always – members of these are like gramophone records of their church’s beliefs, they speak text-books clichés, and all you can do is listen patiently, and then say only that you can’t go on; it’s just no use; there is no real discussion.
Now what should a discussion be if it is to be real. It – as I have implied – must not be like two contrary gramophone records playing alternately at each other. Then it must be an interchange between two people who accept both of them, that they may be changed by the discussion. They must be able to say to themselves that they are willing to have their minds changed by an argument from the other side or by becoming aware that they are prejudiced or have based their views on faulty observations.
Another way of saying this is that we should be free in a discussion. I can’t help being critical of any party or church that does people’s thinking for them. I think a church should be a religious community that unites in a particular sort of worship and encourages its members to carry their experience of what is worth while into every action of life. A political party should be united to get a job done and to discover how to do it with a great a measure of justice for as many people as possible. For the rest, church and party should trust people to do their own thinking.
But now what about the bonds that we put upon ourselves – that are not put upon us by any organisation? What are we going to do about those unconscious urges that twist our thinking, those prejudices that make it impossible to accept the truth when we see it? Sometimes nothing short of being pychoanalised (sic) will set people free from irrational and distorted thinking. But most ordinary people can do something about it themselves for themselves. They can put aside their pride and accept humility. This in fact is what happens every time someone says: I’m beginning to think there’s something in what you say: I’ll go away and chew it over.
Or someone gets up after a lively discussion in a university common room and has the humility to say: This is all rather upsetting; I shall have to rewrite the chapter in my book. Or, still more impressive, when a man comes back to his friend next day and says: This is a bit hard for me – but I’ve got to admit you were right last evening; I’ve been thinking about it half the night.
This is what I mean by humility. I don’t mean humbleness; I don’t mean crawling on your knees lost in admiration of some other person who you think knows so much more than you do. Real humility often shows after a hard tussle, after you’ve done all you can to hold your point of view and then discovered that it wont (sic) do. And when I ask for this, don’t think of the other person in the argument; don’t say to yourself how marvellous it will be if so-and-so gives in after your next discussion with him. Think whether you will have the humility to do so. Sometimes the most valuable discussions are those in which humility is shown all the way through; when two people talk quietly to each other without wanting to stand up for an opinion, but wanting help from each other in thinking their way through difficulties or obscurities; when each knows and admits at the beginning that he is unsure. Conversations between husband and wife ought to be like that; because it brings people very close together when they show that they need each other’s help in their thinking and feeling – in the discoveries they make. On the other hand perhaps nothing drives people apart so much as pride, bawling the other person down, thinking that you must always be in the right.
Do think about this matter of pride – the opposite of humility.
Archive Reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 04