S.[unday] E.[vening] T.[alk] Nov 1961
Civilisation is Only Skin Deep
I expect all of you at one time or another have used the word “thug.” It should properly be pronounced “tug”. It’s an Indian word and the pronunciation of our usual soft “th” doesn’t appear there. Probably none of your will know what the thugs were unless you have read one of the novels of John Masters, which is published in a Penguin edition, which tells the story of the thugs and how throughout a large part of India this secret society was at work – a sort of debased religious society whose religion was the killing of other people indiscriminately, and senselessly. So that the members of that society got a tremendous sense of power and achievement by the killing of men, and it was done swiftly, silently, treacherously, by a curious form of strangling.
Now that is the kind of mania that can seize men, and we know that it is not restricted to people in a distant country like India, or to men of a dark colour. This joy in killing, joy in brutality, that becomes almost a religion, is something to which any people can become addicted. During the late 1930’s we saw this kind of thing growing up in Germany and many of us said in Britain that this cannot possibly happen here, and then about two years before the war broke out, we saw it happen. We say groups of black-shirted men attacking responsible citizens, throwing them down the steps of their own town halls, carrying razor blades in their hands to add to the injury, or knuckle-dusters. We saw ordinary British people debased in this way, and by being called together into gangs in the service of a destructive political philosophy - that was Fascism. It can happen anywhere, to any people, if that people is not continually on the watch to safeguard its standards. Civilisation, if fact, is only skin deep and below the surface of all of us there is the possibility of brutality.
How do we, then, maintain a decent society? We maintain it because some people at least are conscious of the need for it. Some people are conscious of the dangers. Some people watch lest our standards should fall, and some people are continually fostering the spirit of love and the impulse to tenderness, and we have the faith that in the long run these impulses, the impulse to love and the impulse of tenderness will prove the stronger and it is, in fact, proved the stronger.
Now when we are together in any kind of community, like this, our school, we have the opportunity to face this kind of danger and to see that way because we are fairly closely-knit group, because we are together all the time, we can encourage each other to maintain standards; we can defend each other and defend our community against the impulse to let things slip, to drop back to a barbaric and cruel and primitive level. If you look, however, at the world outside us you will see that this kind of degeneracy is on the increase. It is on the increase in what we call an “affluent” society. You will find that this is often on the lips of people today. It means a society towards which everything desirable flows – we are beginning to enter a phase of human productivity in which we can nearly all of us have what we want. We can have all the clothes we want. We can have all the food we want – and rich food! We can have the cars we want. We can have the cameras we want. We can have the holidays we want. We can have the kind of freedom that we think is desirable – the freedom that money confers upon us.
Now that is an affluent society – a society so that everything flows into people’s laps and it is becoming more and more possible for everyone in the population to have that. There are a few poverty-stricken people, but they are much fewer than they used to be. And you see what the result is if you look at the world to-day, that alongside this increase in prosperity, this increase in ownership, we have people who are more vulgar; we have people who are more brutal; people who more greedy; people who are more cruel; people who are more vicious; people who are more callous. In fact human nature does not seem to be able to stand prosperity – human nature can stand danger; it can stand deprivation, but it seems to be unable to stand prosperity.
Now these facts that I have given can be got from the ordinary statistics of crime. Nearly all petty crimes have risen 4-fold since the end of the war – they have become 4 times as great. During the war petty crime was low because everybody was engaged in coping with a dangerous situation. When the danger was over and there was a chance of all the freedom that money could confer, these people began to lower their standards – they no longer needed to work together in the common cause – they grabbed – and the more people have the more they want, and for that reason you see smash-and-grab raids, raids on Post Office vans, raids on mail bags – all those things have increased, not because people need more, but because they have already got more, and having got more they want more.
And not only greed, but standards of relationship between people have fallen, quite seriously. Standards of conduct when they are together. Crimes of, say, drunkenness and the crimes associated with drunkenness have increased between 3 and 4-fold since the end of the war. Sexual crimes committed by people upon young people have increased 3 or 4-fold. The diseases associated with sex have increased seriously. Now these are the things that are happening in our luxurious, prosperous, society, where everybody can have a refrigerator and a spin-drier - or nearly everybody. Now compare that with primitive societies. Remember what Dr. Bunje said about that torch that he left in the Andes among a primitive tribe. They had not only kept that torch safe for him, but they had kept it in the hope that they could give it back to him – I think that was a most touching statement – the thought that here were these uneducated primitive people hoping that a man might some day come back so that they could give him his property. Isn’t that a startling contrast between a primitive, simple people, and our prosperous intelligent people?
You can parallel this in many places. If you go to Ethiopia you will find a great deal of murder and raiding going on. When I was there, on the long road that stretched between Addis Ababa and Eritrea – Ethiopia’s greatest road along which merchandise passes and people with money pass, there was continual raiding and murder – it wasn’t safe to go along that road at any time in the day nor night lest you should, if not be stripped and your car stripped of everything, but you might be murdered. Yet if you go 200 miles into the interior, westward, you are absolutely safe amongst the most primitive people – people who wear nothing at all, who carry only spears, and friends of mine who went there and spent two or three weeks with those utterly primitive people could leave their hut open, all their property lying on the hut – glistening cameras such as the Americans usually carry around with them – all the sort of things that might attract a primitive people, and come back there after hours – many hours away – and find their possessions absolutely untouched. Merely not stolen but not even touched!
Now why is it? Perhaps it is because those people far to the West had so little that they respected the little that each one of them had. Out to the East, however, where they were in touch with prosperity, where they saw Ethiopians dressed in fine modern clothing and owning fine modern cars, they had come into a world which has so much that it must have more, and so they began to be contaminated with this desire for possession.
Now I have said that we can only keep our heads above the level of what we call civilisation – we can only prevent ourselves from sinking back into something that isn’t primitive but is barbarous, if we are quite conscious of what we have to defend – what it is we have to maintain. If we are slack, if we are thoughtless, we shall not only slip back ourselves but let other people slip back too. We have got to have some kind of faith that we hold on to and some kind of determination; some kind of insight – seeing into what is necessary in human beings if they are to live a life that is a life of real fulfilment, and that means we have got to do a lot in schools. Now in an ordinary school – a state school – where children run away from the school very rapidly at 4 o’clock, they haven’t much opportunity because most of the lessons about property, about ownership, about conduct, are lessons that children either learn or don’t learn at home, or that they pick up at the street corner, and some of the lessons picked up at the street corner are precisely the lessons of depravity that I have already told you of. What you tend to learn at the street corner is that being a thug is the best thing to do. Not to be a tender, and sensitive and loving person, but to slip back to the kind of level at which you exploit your neighbour, or you exploit your own sense of power by being cruel to him. But here we can do something more. At the schools that many of you have been through in the past, you know that necessarily and perhaps unavoidably most of the school’s energy has to be put into getting people ready for examinations, so that moral training – that doesn’t necessarily mean training in morals in the ordinary sense, but training in our own inner-quality – that kind of training is neglected simply because there isn’t time for it. But here there is time for it, because that kind of training, that kind of growth can go on right through all the rest of your life.
But we arn’t (sic) free – not by any means free - from these evils that are afflicting the world. I get reports from people who are working with young people in conditions of very varying sorts everywhere. People working in schools, people working in youth clubs , and they all tell the same story, that the evil that has crept into our affluent society is affecting every group of young people everywhere and so it is here. We have rather more of this kind of difficulty in our school than we have had in previous years – rather more coarseness – not necessarily brutality – more lying, more stealing, than we have had before. Not because you are worse people, but because everybody everywhere is affected by the kind of atmosphere that has spread all over our civilisation.
A curious letter came into the school recently. It was addressed to a boy in the School. It was covered (it wasn’t stamped and there was an insulting remark to the postman on it that it was ‘to be delivered and the School would pay the 6d.’) – it was covered with scurrilous remarks of one kind or another, so we didn’t deliver it to the boy concerned, we opened it, because here was somebody playing a dirty trick on the School. Inside was an imaginary membership form of an imaginary club, and the rules of membership were that nobody would be admitted to membership unless he had beaten up at least three people, and the beating up could be with anything other than a revolver. It could be with a lead pipe, it could be with a knife, it could be with a boot, but no one was to have membership of this club unless he had committed these atrocities on at least three people.
No doubt none of the people concerned in this imaginary club, (or possibly the club is a real one amongst school-boys) would have done that kind of thing. It’s a fancy, but it’s a reflection of what is happening in the world if people can have such fancies. The fact that people can imagine, and think of such things, shows the tendency that is at work among us, and I imagine that even among you there will be occasional fantasies of that sort. Fantasies (that is what one calls this kind of thing), fantasies of cruelty, fantasies of power, fantasies of getting your own back on the world or on other people, fantasies that in fact cut you off from the source of goodness.
I have mentioned that we have trouble with stealing, and lying, and to show you how it’s not unusual for this to creep into a fairly respectable community, as I think we might call ours, I will tell you of something I saw in a newspaper just two days ago. Leicester University ( I think it is Leicester) has had to close down one of its large libraries – simply close it down and lock the door, so that students can no longer use the library, because within a few weeks £170-worth of books have vanished. One of you told me that at college in London the amount of breakages of crockery and losses of cutlery have risen to an enormous level – a level never before reached. Now that parallels what is happening here. Because we are in a world where there is so much stuff pouring out of the machines what does it matter if one more plate is lost, one more bit of cutlery thrown into the dustbin? But it is good that we should be so affected by the world we live in? Haven’t we, here, because we have got a chance, a far better chance than other people, haven’t we got to make up our minds that we are going to stand up against this kind of thing. The world has got to get through this. It’s absolutely necessary that we should get through this phase.
Now many of you are bothered about the bomb. I know that that is in the minds of many of you – that you are afraid of it – that it hangs over our life like a shadow. Some of you may even be sensitive and thoughtful enough to say to yourself “Perhaps I have only a month or a year to live.” Now I think in fact that that is affecting people widely. It may account partly for the callousness of people. But do you want to say this. I don’t believe it will happen. I don’t believe humanity or civilisation is going to be destroyed. I believe that we shall survive. Now if that is so, if we are going to survive, we have got to ask ourselves the question: Survival for what? What’s the world going to be like? Is it going to be a good world if we do survive the bomb? Is it going to be a world worth living in? Is it going to be a world of happiness, of love, of tenderness, of co-operation? Is it going to be the kind of world where people will grab at property, or the kind of world where people can make things with their own hands, where people can paint pictures, and write poems, and write poetry; write music and listen to music, more that they have ever done before. Where people can enjoy an unspoilt countryside - all the things that give us joy and happiness. Is it going to be a world where we can really have all those things, or is a world where in spite of having escaped the bomb, we have got corruption right and left?
Well I think we have a chance here to play our part. When the world is in a bad state it depends enormously on groups of people here and there being the groups in which some kind of standard is preserved. Where you hold on tight to what is good, so that when this phase has passed you will be able to help build the kind of world we need and which everybody needs. The number of people who can resist corruption is few. We can’t blame the people who are scattered right through the ordinary community if they fall short, because think what little chance most children have of keeping up standards when they are exposed all the time to the most pernicious influences. But that puts a heavier responsibility on you and us here, because while you are here, at least, we have removed the pernicious influences from you. You can live together with some kind of understanding, and by the way you live together you can get some kind of insight into what really makes for a good life. And so a very heavy responsibility rests of the people at a place of this sort, to keep the good alive so that when people need it they can find it in you.
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 34