Reviews of the Week
The Modern Predicament
Liberties, of the Mind. By Charles Morgan. (Macmillan. 1 2S. 6d.) Mos-r people arc aware that it is only by a disingenuous revision of the meaning of the word " freedom" that we conceal from our- selves the fact that the exercise of freedom has been greatly reduced in the last twenty-five years. The prevailing mood is one of being ready to surrender freedom: among less foolish people, for something believed to be of equal value ; among others, for the mere promise of a dream. Much, says Mr. Charles Morgan, has been lost (some of it well lost), but those who are still absolute for freedom must now consider the defence of the citadel—not the " outward liberties" of behaviour, but " the liberties of the mind itself." The concern of these essays is the danger in which the " core of the mind " stands of being dispossessed of its independence.
The opening essay, on Mind Control, states the theme. There are passages in it which run smoothly and whose meaning is inter- rupted only by the glossy mellowness of the prose ; but as a whole the statement bristles with ambiguities. It would, perhaps, be a piece of philosophical pedantry to object to the way in which Mr. Morgan uses the word " mind " (as if it were a piece of sacred machinery): if we are to get anywhere with the book we must be content to suppose that we know what he means even if we should prefer another way of speaking. Nevertheless, a good deal of the confusion seems to spring from what may be called Mr. Morgan's concept of mind. However, apart from this, the reader is left in serious doubt about what Mr. Morgan is getting at. We seem, at first, to be invited to take note of the appearance (or near-appearance) of a scientific technique by means of which a man may be dispossessed of his " mind " and become an automaton in the control of a technician. The evidence adduced (and admitted to be " scant ") is the behaviour of prisoners in the Soviet trials, and a conversation Mr. Morgan had with an unnamed physicist whose vision extended to the possibility of being able to take possession completely of another man's " mind." When he is on this tack, Mr. Morgan steers his readers, with a practised hand, on an artificially darkened course, beset with half-imagined Gothic horrors and uncanny experiences. But we are never properly frightened because the devilry is never properly revealed.
The other tack is made in broad daylight ; its horrors are palpable and familiar—and consequently genuinely horrible. Here we are not being scared by the vague suggestion of some diabolically ingenious psychological technique which science has in pickle for us; we are having our attention called to the circumstances in the contemporary world which restrict the range of independent judge- ment and individual moral choice—the gross pressure of numbers which goes to compose a morally worthless public opinion, and the moral delusion that when we have discovered how to do something we are well advised to do it. But even here, in the full light of day, the nameless horror cannot be excluded ; the whole process (following a phrase of Tennyson's) is presented as " a mighty wave of evil " thrown up by comparatively recent events. And while the well-chosen phrase heightens the mystery of our predicament, our attention is directed to something very banal— not to the root of chaos, but merely to the danger of immorality when it is allied with great power. Mr. Morgan seems to belong to that school of moralists which urges fear of destruction as the motive for mending our ways.
We are left, then, with some latitude of choice in the interpreta- tion of our disease, though in one way or another " science" is at the bottom of it. This is unfortunate, because what we look for in a moralist is a clear vision of the predicament. Mr. Morgan has chosen to write at an awkward level. There is a level of diagnosis at which it would be in order to ask for the villains to be named and to demand their prosecution. And there is a profound level at which hope and fear are equally out of place, where the situa- tion is seen to be desperate but not serious, as St. Augustine, for example, saw it. Mr. Morgan, however, has chosen a difficult middling station: he is remote without being profound, lofty without being confident, and he is engaged but with insufficiently identified enemies. And the confusion is carried over into the remedies he propounds. Surely it argues a want of proper con- sideration of the relation between this so-called " liberty of the mind itself " and the familiar overt liberties, or a deep-rooted
ambiguity of outlook, to suggest that we should " disengage the liberty of thought as a distinct and inalienable liberty " and " make it cognisable by positive lav,"
The bulk of the book consists in short essays, each a neat varia- tion on the imperfectly imagined theme of the Introduction. Most of them have appeared before in periodicals, and taken separately they express an agreeably sentimental, nostalgic view of life. But the collection of them here serves mainly to show up the thinness of the theme they are set to illustrate. The truth is. 1 suppose, that Mr. Morgan's temperament is ill-fitted to deal with the theme which he handles so delicately in these pages. There is nothing disgraceful in being nostalgic or in turning over affectionately the things one has learnt to value ; but nostalgia gets in the way of precision, and to treat this theme precision is necessary. And, again, a mind devoid of irony and incapable of satire, a disposi- tion without the energy of bitterness and without either the anger or detachment of saintliness, will seem unfitted for the task. The book does not lack sincerity, Mr. Morgan really does care about the predicament as he sees it ; but he fails to convince us of its reality. The style—this urbane, smoothly confidential, humourless style—meets the theme, and we are left happily splashing one another in the safety of slack water. And if an occasional ripple gets up our noses and makes us splutter—if he throws in the obser- vation that the history of the last fifty years has been " a steady movement towards barbarism interrupted by ineffectual idealistic swerves "—we are made to feel that it is all part of the game.
In short, Mr. Morgan's theme is that of 1984. But Orwell's precise and microscopic imagination and his ironic vision are replaced by a soft anxiety about incompletely imagined possibilities and a mannered rhetoric too nicely tuned to be effective. Nowhere have the last days of mankind been more urbanely contemplated.
MICHAEL OAKESHOTT.
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