to a small area; but the penalties now lurking in the underground bunkers and germ-warfare laboratories, lurking and waiting to pounce on any national or governmental selfishness and stupidity, are so gigantic that we cannot afford any personal isolationism in these matters.
60 Countries and blocs also live in relationships like marriage. To have the passion of love (to five in peace, which in the world as it is means in a state where the over-privileged are left in safe possession of their privileges) they have to have war. So ages of prosperity and security breed the counterpoles. An age of self is always mother to an age of war.
61 It is customary to talk of ‘international tension’ and ‘nuclear annihilation’ as if these things were terrible. But we love the terror. It is like salt to us. We live under the threat of an annihilatory war; and on it.
62 The two world wars were wars among societies dominated by the emotions of the adolescent. East and West, unhappily and passionately married in the house of the world, both derive vigour and energy from their mutual love-hatred. They erect and exercise and thrill each other. They stimulate each other in many ways besides the economic.
63 There are enough hostile factors (overpopulation, poverty, disease, ignorance) in the human situation to provide endless extramarital counterpoles. There is no inescapable need for man to be his own worst enemy. Many other things are queueing close to have that role.
THE ULTIMATE TENSION
64 The power of a tension is proportionate to its mystery. To be aware of and to understand a tension produces two results. Like lightning on a dark night it reveals what is, and it reveals the way ahead. It thus allows the transposition to a personally or socially less harmful tension to be made. It permits the tension to be controlled, rather than to control.
65 Knowledge of a tension therefore inaugurates two situations: a seeing through the old, and a craving for a new. Because we love and need mystery, we are often reluctant to analyze situations in which mystery seems to inhere. The chief such situation is in ourselves, in the tensions we exist in. We despise primitive cultures for the taboos with which they surround sacred groves and caves and the like; but we still encourage exactly similar taboos in the antique landscapes of the mind.
66 Yet even here we must distinguish between the selfish attachment to mystery that is really a lazy refusal to think or act and our essential need of a residual mystery in life as a whole. This mystery, between what we know and what we know we will never know, is the ultimate tension.
67 The more knowledge we have the more intense this mystery becomes. It may diminish from our point of view, but it condenses.
68 We tend to think that evolution must be a vast attack on mystery. We suppose our highest goal must be to know all. We consequently try to ignore, or destroy, or vitiate, what genuine mysteries life contains.
69 We are intended to solve much of the mystery; it is harmful to us. We have to invent protections against the sun, in many situations; but to wish to destroy the sun? The easier mysteries, how at a superficial level things work mechanically, how things are ‘caused’, have been largely solved. Many take these mysteries for the whole mystery. The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.
70 The task of education is to show the mysteries solved; but also to show where mystery has not been, and will not be, solved – and in the most familiar objects and events. There is mystery enough at noon; no need to multiply the midnight rites.
71 The counterpole of all that is existent and known or knowable, that is ‘God’, must be infinite mystery, since only so can a tension remain to keep mankind from collapsing into total knowledge, or a ‘perfect’ world that would be a perfect hell. From this knowledge-mystery tension there is no transposing; and it is the source of human being.
72 All predictions are wagers. All predictions about the future are about what is not scientifically certain, but only scientifically probable. This fundamental uncertainty is essential to life. Every look forward is a potential illusion. This satisfies our need for insecurity; since in an eternally insecure situation we must externally seek knowledge and security, and never completely find them.
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OTHER PHILOSOPHIES
1 We may reject some of these as we might reject certain houses to live in; we cannot reject them as houses for anyone else to live in, we cannot deny them utility in part, beauty in part, meaningfulness in part; and therefore truth in part.
2 Ernst Mach: A piece of knowledge is never false or true – but only more or less biologically and evolutionally useful. All dogmatic creeds are approximations: these approximations form a humus from which better approximations grow.*
CHRISTIANITY
3 In a hundred years ecclesiastical Christianity will be dead. It is already a badly-flawed utility. The current ecumenical mania, the ‘glorious new brotherhood’ of churches, is a futile scrabbling behind the wainscots of reality.
4 This is not to deny what Christianity has done for humanity. It was instituted by a man of such active philosophical and evolutionary genius that it is little wonder that he was immediately called (as it was a necessary part of his historical efficacy that he should be) divine.
5 Christianity has protected the most precarious, because most evolved, section of the human race from itself. But in order to sell its often sound evolutionary principles it was obliged to ‘lie’; and these ‘lies’ made it temporarily more, but now finally less, effective.
6 In no foreseeable future will many of the general social laws and attitudes stated or implied in Christianity be archaic; this is because they are based on compassion and common sense. But there is in every great religion a process akin to the launching of space vehicles; an element that gives the initial boost, the getting off the ground, and an element that stays aloft. Those who cling to Christian metaphysical dogma are trying to keep launcher and launched together.
7 Furthermore, the essential appeal of a religion will always be racial, and always more accessible to the originating race or racial group than to others. A religion is a specific reaction to an environment, a historical predicament; and therefore always in some sense inadequate to those who live in different environments and predicaments.
8 First the buttress of dogmatic faith strengthens, then it petrifies; just as the heavy armour of some prehistoric reptiles first enabled them to survive and then caused them to disappear. A dogma is a form of reaction to a special situation; it is never an adequate reaction to all situations.
9 The Bet Situation: however much evidence of historical probability the theologians produce for the incredible (in terms of modern scientific credibility) events of the life of Jesus, they can never show that these events took place verifiably in the way they claim they took place. The same is finally true, of course, of any remote historical event. We are always reduced, in the bitter logical end, to the taking of some such decision as the Kierkegaardian step in the dark of the Pascalian pari; and if I refuse to believe these incredible events took place, then it can be said that I am doing no more than taking my own blind step in the opposite direction. A certain kind of blind believer, not confined to Christianity but common in it since the days of Tertullian, uses the apparent
