Summer 1962
[CRITICISM OF AUTHORITY]
During yesterday afternoon the producer of the B.B.C. programme which is to be heard on July 25th, got me to make a number of pithy remarks about educational problems, which he photographed and recorded to that he could use them if it proved suitable at various points in the course of this documentary film which is to be the result of all this effort in this and other schools. Now when I am asked to make brief statements about my own views on education and what we are trying to do in this school I always have a bit of reaction afterwards, because when you make a statement that has to be compressed into about three or four sentences you haven’t a chance to put in all the doubts and hesitations that you may have about your own policey and your own ideas, and as a bald statement gives one a reaction afterwards so that one says – afterwards – “Gosh, is that really true of the school? Do I really believe that? Do I put that into practice?”
Now, one of the statements I made was to this effect. That in schools teachers should not train children to accept what they are told, but that rather they should encourage them to criticism and even reject what they are told by grown-ups. I said that I didn’t want to produce yes men but people who could stand up in a lively way to the most gruelling of interviews, and I had in mind the fact that many of our pupils go for interviews to enter universities and the interviewers test them out to see whether they have got minds of their own or whether they are just gramophone records of what they have been told at school: on the whole our pupils do pretty well at interviews.
But now supposing that that is accepted as the policy of the school? We have to remember that every policy has its dangers. There is no policy for human beings that is fool-proof, or that is safe. Everything that you try to do may produce to some extent the opposite of what you want to do. It is like the penny – there is always something on the other side, and that is why you get the quotation “Oh! That’s the other side of the penny”. And there always is another side of the penny where policies are concerned.
Now I want to ask this question. If you are trained to criticise and even to reject what we ask you to do, does your duty end there? There is a danger that you will simply think that to criticise and reject is your sole duty and forget that to criticise and reject should be a stage on the way to a more constructive state of mind. You can’t get a constructive state of mind if you just become a gramophone record, repeating what you are told. You can get a constructive state of mind if you examine carefully everything you are told, make it true for yourself if it is true for yourself; reject it at least for the time being if you cannot find anything in yourself that really responds to it.
Now it looks at first to a good many people, it will probably seem to a number of people when listening to that film at watching it on July 25th, that I am encouraging a policy of individualism; and that is precisely that danger. They will say there is a place in the world and among people for authority, and people are inadequate if they don’t know when to accept authority and how to accept authority. Now let’s have a look at that. Let’s have a look at it through the personalities of a number of great people. Think of the names of the people that appear on your dormitory doors. One of them is “Joan of Arc”. Joan of Arc was a person who thought for herself; who thought for herself amongst the welter of stupidity and terror that her countrymen were guilty of, but she came to a point when something said “You must do this”. She called that something “her voices” and if you have read Shaw’s “St. Joan” you will find the very impressive dramatic moment in which she is challenged about the authority of her voices and she states very firmly her belief in that authority. There came to her a time when she said “I’m told to do this: I must do it. I can do no other”.
Another dormitory has the name of Albert Schweitzer on it. Albert Schweitzer was one of the deepest and most intelligent thinkers of our modern world. He didn’t just train himself in medicine; he trained himself also in philosophy, which is thinking about things; the examination of logical thought; the examination of what every thinker is trying to do in his own department. And not until he was almost at the point of middle age was he satisfied that he was right and then he accepted authority – something inside him that said “Your task is not to become one of the great scholars but to go out and meet the needs of the most deprived and humble of the world’s creatures; to meet the needs of the exploited; the people who are totally uncared for”. He accepted some kind of authority that said “You must do this” even though that authority was something that came from within himself.
Robert Owen was another man who accepted a new kind of authority. He was an employer and, almost alone among employers, he had come through his own independent thinking to a point where he said to himself “I am responsible for the personal life of my employees and my business must be run in such a way as primarily to administer for their needs – not just to make profit for shareholders. And in a sense Robert Owen was the father of all that is good in socialism.
There are two other names that appear on dormitory doors: one “Pasteur” and the other “Leonardo”. What was their authority? They were both men of tremendous independence of mind; men who thought out new things where other men were just stumped. Pasteur, in the face of a great deal of criticism, established the theory, the facts, about contagious disease; about infection; about the existence of microbes, and he persevered because he felt that through this search for the truth he had discovered an authority which is truth itself.
Leonardo was just such another man. He worked on a much wider field; he sought for truth in mathematics; in construction; in mechanics; in everything that was scientific in his day, and also in the art of his day. The story of his work on the pictures is a story of an unending disciplined search for what was true in his relation between his own vision and the world that he saw.
So all these men were men of great independence of mind, but yet men who accepted an authority when they found it. That’s what I hope, of course, will happen to each of you even in a much lesser way; in the way you exercise your own independence of mind, but it is a struggle. This is where independence of mind goes wrong. When you just exercise your independence in one thing after another. “But I’m going to think for myself about this”. “I’m going to think for myself about that”. “ I am not going to be argued out of this”. When just one thing after another comes to you and you insist on being different and on your own. That may be a phase to pass through but it is not a phase to stay in. What one has to discover through independence of mind is everything drawing to one focal point – like all the rays that pass through a lens and come to one burning spot. And all these men you see brought together the rays that came into their minds and spirit to one burning spot of conviction and authority until the fire that was generated in them made them feel that they just had to do something; they had to stick to something; had to pursue some kind of thought or action; had to serve some cause. All of it, you see, is a search from the outside to the inside, gathering together the whole of experience until it catches fire inside our spirits. Now is that infallible, faultless, that can’t go wrong? No, another man went through a great struggle to find what he could devote his life to and he wrote up his struggle in a book that was called “Mein Kampf”; and that book was written by Hitler, and “Mein Kampf” means “My Struggle”. Hitler became a man of one idea; everything came to a focus in him. He served one purpose. He didn’t seek his own ends, his own selfish ends. He was an aesthetic man – he neither smoked, nor drank, nor was in any sense immoral in the ordinary sense.
How are you going to test whether you are a Schweitzer of a Hitler in your own small way? You have got to have some kind of other authority coming from without to enable you to make that test for yourself. I ask you to question yourself. What would be the authority, or the test – the litmus paper – so to speak, by which you would tell in which direction you were going? For me the test would be this. Is this concentration, this focusing of the human spirit, moved by love or by hate? And in making that test one is making the test of Christianity. In Hitler it was not moved by love. He said that love was soft; that you couldn’t by love give a great race a destiny. Although he didn’t say it explicitly very often, in fact he was moved by hatred and he infected his people with hatred.
Well, I suggest there [is] a test; you might ask yourselves whether you could apply that test to yourselves. Our authority must be tested against what we can understand about other people – and that includes Christ himself – and what we can understand of history and tradition. Henry Ford, the manufacturer of motor cars, said that history is bunk – as though by saying that he could reject all that human experience had gone through. We can’t. And we have got to test our own convictions and the authority that grows up within ourselves against all that we cannot understand and what has happened in the past, so that history – in so far as we can understand it – matters. And another thing we have got to do is to test ourselves humbly against other people; see what we can make of the authority that other people seem to carry about with them. We’ve got to be sort of sensitive and humble, even about the convictions that grow up in ourselves.
I read that piece from the Gospels just for the sake of those words, which in the original version are: “This man speaks as one with authority and not as the scribes”. His was not the authority for the external rules the law give us, but his was the authority of a man through whom God spoke and who spoke out of the very depths of his experience, and to know him and to hear him was to be convinced. Now in some measure other people can bring us that authority; an quite a variety of people. I have known agnostics – people who couldn’t easily assent to Christianity – who yet spoke with authority in what they said about their relationships and the things to which they devoted their lives, and we had in here one day many years ago a white-coated Dominican father – a Catholic – who spoke humbly about his faith, and through my knowledge of him I know that he spoke with authority. And it is against people of the sort that we have got to test our own convictions; to discover whether we have a unity with such people.
Now there are other occasions when you have to submit to an authority you don’t accept – so far I have been talking entirely about authority that we can work out for ourselves and accept in ourselves or in others. Are there occasions when you have to submit to an authority that you object to or an authority that you haven’t yet decided about? There are. Because in this world quite often things have to be done – you cannot leave things undone. You can’t wait until everybody is agreed that this is the right way to do things; they just have to be done. Politicians and headmasters often feel this very deeply because they are often in charge when there are emergencies to be faced; the politician has to make a decision affecting the life of 50 million people, or perhaps 4,000 million people. He can’t wait until every one of these people agreed with him. And the headmaster has to do the same thing - a decision has to be made within the next five minutes. He cannot get the whole school together and convince every one of them of the rightness of his decision – if he did the crisis would have passed and would not have been tackled. So because we live together in groups, because we are not individuals and each existing in his own separate acre with a wall all round him; because we live in groups decisions have to be made for us and we have to have goodwill towards the people who make those decisions.
I encourage you to think critically about politics and about politicians, but even where you think critically about them I think a little goodwill is owing to them when you realise the immense responsibilities they carry. Many of them – quite sincere men – doing what you would not do or what you would object to and yet having to make a decision. And therefore we always owe them some loyalty because they make decisions for us even if they are decisions that we object to. We have, by our very rough and ready democratic methods, to put people in power and, in a measure, we have to trust them; trust them as persons at least, though there are times of course when some burning question arises and there is something in you that says “I cannot stand this; I will rebel”; and then you go on the Aldermaston march. And you are right to do so because you are obeying something within yourself that speaks with greater authority than the politician; the authority perhaps of your own conscience, or it may be the authority (if you are a religious person) that you believe to be God speaking within you. This is a thing that you cannot stand. And that is the occasion for revolutions and rebellions that are right. History is marked here and there with revolutions and rebellions and we cannot regret them. There are times when authority has to be overthrown, but you have to be very, very sure, that you do not overthrow authority through sheer individualism, or bitterness, of mere opinionatedness; that your desire to overcome it comes from a really deep conviction that unites you with other people in your community.
Now ordinary life doesn’t throw up such extremes as the one I have just been describing. When we think of the Charge of the Light Brigade, for instance, we are thinking of stupid people in control, and until the last war very often armies threw up as their leaders the most stupid – not the most intelligent. Stupidity was quite often guarantee of success in armies; I hardly realise why, but it was. And those of us who were old enough to think during the First World War were aghast at the stupidity of military people. In the last war that was not so; we had learnt a lesson and we were beginning to put our most intelligent people in charge, but even so, those men often had to make decisions that involved the unnecessary death of many people, but they had to make those decisions and those decisions had to be obeyed, because if soldiers and officers started arguing then nothing happens at all and you are totally defeated.
Now as I have said, ordinary life doesn’t involve such extremes as that; in most cases just ordinary people are in control – not stupid ones. People who try to do their job as well as they can and have to make decisions from time to time affecting the lives of other people. And we have to accept their decisions, and when you go into industry, or whatever it may be as your chosen occupation, you will be under people who will have to make decisions for you and cannot always stop to consult you, and in a measure you have got to accept these decisions, though you should seek opportunities when – with the greatest goodwill – you can ask them questions about their reasons, and if you think them wrong, with courtesy tell them so. And I say with courtesy, not with opinionatedness nor with big-headedness, but in the hope that you will be contributing something to the task that they have to responsible for.
Now we are coming down to the more humble things; coming back to school. I ask you to think for yourselves; to criticise and even reject, sometimes, the things that I say. At the same time the school has to be run; aides, counsellors, staff, dormitory leaders – all have to make decisions, and they are not always decisions that you agree with and yet if they didn’t make the decisions the whole place would fall to pieces in chaos. That is where your part come in accepting authority as something necessary for the ordinary conduct of the life of a group of people.
Now, to recapitulate. Everyone must think for himself, but not disconnectedly; in such a way as to bring all his thinking to one focal point - and remember how I compared that focal point to the focal point of a lens which produces a spot of heat which may set things on fire; and we do need to be set on fire when we really become vigorous and lively and active people who have got something to give to the world. We have to accept the authority of what we discover for ourselves, but we have to remember that there is another kind of authority – a temporary authority – which everyone who has responsibility for the life of a group of people has to exert. If I didn’t exert authority I would not be doing my job, but it is also my task to think every time I have issued an order whether that order was the best kind of order. Of course it won’t always be; I hope it will be more often than not.
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 39