The Aristos

humanity.

25 An education in humanity must inculcate a oneness of situation in each mind in each land: a common predicament and a common existence, a common right to recompense, and a common justification and justice. It must therefore teach children to see the faults in society; by teaching them for nationalistic reasons to pretend that bad things are good, we teach them to teach the same. A bad lesson has a long life.

26 What the state or the system considers a good teacher and what is a good teacher are always two different things. A good teacher never teaches only his subject.

27 It has never been more important that we should have such teachers; and this is because we now know that in another fifty years’ time the great bulk of our teaching will be done by machines. To those who can conceive of education only as the learning of facts and techniques that will be useful to the economic system, this prospect is excellent. No human teacher will be able to equal a well-programmed computer-teacher in his command of the science of his subject, or in his efficiency as an imparter of information.

28 I referred to this mechanistic heresy in the discussion of Christianity. But the best method is the most effective one for the situation, not the most efficient in theory. The menace facing us in the near future is that we shall be ourselves mechanized into believing that the good teacher is the most efficient in terms of the facts of his subject. If we believe this, then we shall fall under the tyranny of our computers – in short, under the worst, because universal, form of nationalism in the history of man.

29 But not all is black in this prospect. There are many fields in which we can welcome the computer- teacher; and that will free the human teachers for the teaching of the subjects (perhaps it would be better to say method of teaching) where they cannot be supplanted. And one of the prime purposes of the triple education in humanity I am advocating will be to counteract, or place in perspective, the triumph of the computer in its appropriate fields.

ART AND SCIENCE

30 This specific problem of the computer-teacher leads to the next great problem: that of the proper roles of science and art in human life.

31 Everyone should have a sound grounding in all the fundamental sciences, and all should know the great linchpin, the axis of reason, that is, scientific method. But large areas of science are remote from the ordinary business of living, and I would define the areas most relevant to education in humanity as those that destroy prejudice, superstition and the kind of ignorance that is clearly harmful to society. In March, 1963, hundreds of Balinese were killed in a volcanic eruption because they would not leave their homes. They believed that the gods would punish anyone who ran away. Our world spends millions on exploring planets we already know to be uninhabitable and yet lets such lethal stupidity still brew on Earth.

32 Science has two principal effects on its practitioners. One, totally beneficial, is heuristic – that is, it trains the scientist to think and discover for himself. Plainly we need as much education in this aspect of science as we can get. But another characteristic of science is double-edged, and this is its tendency to analyse, to break down the whole into components. Now plainly analysis is a very vital part of the heuristic process; but its side-effects, as in some medicines, may be extremely pernicious.

33 The purely analytic scientist becomes so accustomed to seeing matter as a demonstration of certain verifiable or falsifiable principles that he fives at one remove from it. Between him and the real world springs the law, the explanation, the necessity to categorize. Everything Midas touched turned to gold, everything this kind of scientist touches turns to its function m his analysis.

34 There is another allied danger. The complexity of the modern sciences is such that specialization is essential; not only in the interests of scientific or industrial efficiency, but in the nature of the mind’s capacity. The scholar in many fields is extinct; not because the desire to be such a scholar is extinct, but because the fields are too many, and too complex.

35 Pure science and impure economics both require of the scientist that he should live most of his thinking life along some spoke remote from the true hub of society of which he is a member; and from the true hub of the now in which he is. This produces the characteristic and expectable two-facedness of the modern scientist: scientific morality and social immorality. Scientists have an inherent tendency to become slaves of the state.

36 The scientific mind, in being totally scientific, is being unscientific. We are in a phase of history where the scientific pole is dominant; but where there is pole, there is counterpole. The scientist atomizes, someone must synthesize; the scientist withdraws, someone must draw together. The scientist particularizes, someone must universalize. The scientist dehumanizes, someone must humanize. The scientist turns his back on the as yet, and perhaps eternally, unverifiable; and someone must face it.

37 Art, even the simplest, is the expression of truths too complex for science to express, or to conveniently express. This is not to say that science is in some way inferior to art, but that they have different purposes and different uses. Art is a human shorthand of knowledge, a crucible, an algebra, a tremendous condensing in the case of great art of galaxies of thoughts, facts, memories, emotions, events, experiences, to ten lines in Macbeth, to six bars in Bach, to a square foot of canvas in a Rembrandt.

38 Certain scientific laws may seem analogous to great art; they condense countless trillions of phenomena into one statement. But this statement is an abstraction, not a concentration, of reality.

39 All arts tend to become sciences, or crafts; but the essential mystery in art is that the artist constantly surpasses whatever the science or the craft of the art might have foretold; and constantly surpasses the scientific description and evaluation of what is art and what is good or bad art.

40 Art is always a complex beyond science. It computes all the computers. One might feed the tastes of a thousand musical people into a computer, which could then compose ‘their’ music; but it would deny the great principle – an artefact is pre-eminently whatever only one man could have made. It is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.*

41 Science is what a machine can or might do; art is what it will never do. This is a definition of what art should and must be to mankind; not a denial of the already proven fact that science can perfectly well manufacture what can pass as art.

42 A good scientist cuts the umbilical cord between his private personality, his emotions, his self, and his creation; his discovery of a new law, or phenomenon, or property. But a good artefact is always a limb, a branch, a second self. Science disembodies; art embodies.

43 It is tempting to treat artefacts as phenomena that can be best apprehended when scientifically analysed and classified; thence the sciences of art history and of criticism. From this springs the illusion that all art is contained within the science that can describe, appraise and categorize it; thence, the ridiculous belief that art is finally ‘inferior’ to science, as if nature is inferior to natural history.

44 This scientization of art, so characteristic of our age, is absurd. Science has shaken off the fetters of art, and now fetters art. Above all it scientizes the inmost characteristic of art – mystery. For what good science tries to eliminate, good art seeks to provoke – mystery, which is lethal to the one, and vital to the other.

45 Of course I do not wish to deny the utility of a scientific criticism, a natural history, of art. But I should like to see destroyed the notion that art is a pseudo-science; that it is sufficient to know art; that art is knowable in the sense that an electronic circuit or a rabbit’s foetus is knowable.

46 Different tools and languages; different superficial notions of what is vital in existence, therefore different superficial aims; different minds; yet all great scientists are in a sense artists and all great artists are in a sense scientists, since they have the same human aim: to approach a reality, to convey a reality, to symbolize a reality, to summarize a reality, to convince of a reality. All serious scientists and artists want the same: a truth that no one will need to change.

47 All symbolization, and all science and all art is symbolization, is an attempt to escape from time. All symbols summarize; evoke what is absent; serve as tools; permit us to control our movements in the river of time, and are thus attempts to control time.

But science tries to be true of an event for all time; while art tries to be an event for all time.

48 Neither the scientifically nor the artistically expressed reality is the most real reality. The ‘real’ reality is a