Let's all swing together
Sir: I was particularly interested to read the article by A. E. Dyson (13 September) with its reference to our current moral malaise. He says, 'The roots go back as far as Rousseau and his romantic disciples, who initiated the replacement of European wisdom by a rag- bag of half-baked notions ... ' I thought this article was well written and stimulating. It connected, in my mind with a passage which I first read in 1952:
'Willingly or unwillingly Darwin had to give still greater force to that system of unsystematised, inarticulate metaphysical fallacies, which one might term the Creed of The Ontological Invalidity ; both in the sense that it dismisses a priori as invalid all ontological assertions about the nature and meaning of Being (as different from the laws governing the processes, connections and interconnections of the phenomenal world, of all that becomes, develops, evolves) as well as in the sense that it has made an incur-
able invalid of the human intelligence which, grasping their relevance, is capable of responding positively to questions asked about what the world is. To such questions the modern intelligence is prone to respond with that mixture of shame, embarrassment, revulsion and arrogance, which is the characteristic reaction of impotence to un- fortunately unmanageable demands. This invalid has been left ever since in the nursing care of unhappy poets, dreamers or religious eccentrics, if he was not satisfied with the treatment he received as an outpatient of the Church'
This is from The Disinherited Mind by Erich Heller, and I think it is relevant to the problems postulated in the article you pub- lished. For the man of conscience, the modern world is a place where one does indeed walk precariously, and the more in- dividual responsibility diminishes, the more it is taken over by the state, the bureaucracy and facelessness with which we are increas- ingly surrounded. I believe Mr Dyson is right when he talks about the values of Christian belief, and what Blake called the 'mental fight' has been going on with me, since 1946.
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