crank who maintains that the world is flat may become very angry when he is given clear proofs to the contrary. His anger will certainly not prove his case; but it will often tend to preserve his case from further attack.
141 The prime intention of this mental territory we erect around us is of course to counteract our sense of nemo, of nonentity; and this immediately warns us that it is not sufficient to destroy the vanities, illusions and complexes with which we wall ourselves in (or demarcate ourselves) since thereby we risk destroying identity. What we need to do is to discover what is valid in this demarcation-fortification material; and then to let the discovery of what is valid show to the frightened person inside the fortifications what is invalid.
142 The understanding of the roles subordinate and domination play in our fives; the analysis of what is strictly necessary in the role adopted (or of the way the individual distributes different roles to himself); and establishing the validity of the mental territory’ we attempt to define; these represent the basis for an educational personal analysis of each student. This does not of course preclude analysis based on more familiar psychological theories; the systems of Adler and Karen Homey must be particularly relevant. But this gives most hope of bringing more self-understanding, tolerance and a greater equality in existence to our world.*
143 I can best describe this inward phase of education by giving the questions it should, by the time it is complete, enable its students to answer.
Who am I?
In what ways am I similar to and in what ways different from most other human beings?
What are my duties to myself?
What are my duties towards others?
What are the duties of an employer, an employee, a member of a state, an individual?
To what extent, given my capacities, do I fulfil and balance these conflicting extremes?
What do I mean by love?
What do I mean by guilt?
What do I mean by justice?
What is science to me?
What is art to me?
THE SYNOPTIC EDUCATION
144 This education is concerned with only one thing: why all is as all is. Since we are in the same situation as human beings, it must be identical the world over.
145 It must comprehend the study of the great religions and philosophies of the past – and present – but since its intention is synoptic, they must be presented as interpretations or metaphors of reality. We know that in this domain the truth is always more complex than our formulation of it.
146 It seems to me that the inescapable conclusion of any truly synoptic view of human existence is that the chief aim of evolution is the preservation of matter. Each form of animate matter is given a reason for living; and our human reason is the establishment of equality of recompense in living. Since in our present world unnecessary inequalities are ubiquitous, a proper synoptic education must lead to a sense of discontent that is also a sense of moral purpose.
147 I believe also that it must discredit the notion that God (in the traditional sense) can, in any but the negative way I have described, be presumed to have human characteristics or powers; in short, we will do better to assume there is no such God.
148 Finally it will destroy our last childish belief in an afterlife, through which, like a hole in a bucket, real life leaks away. If death is absolute, life is absolute; life is sacred; kindness to other life is essential; today is more than tomorrow; noon conquers night. To do is now, living; death is never able to do.
149 Everything finally is means, nothing is end. All we call immortal is mortal. What a nuclear holocaust may do, time certainly will do. So live now, and teach it.
150 The mystery is not in the beginning or the end, but in the now. There was no beginning; there will be no end.
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THE IMPORTANCE OF ART
1 By art, I mean all the arts; by artists, creators in all the arts; by artefacts, anything that can be enjoyed in the absence of the artist. Since the discovery of sound recording and cinematography it is arguable that great performances, for example in music or in drama, are now artefacts. However, by artefact I mean here what it traditionally means. The composer’s, not the interpretant’s, kind of creating; the playwright’s, not the actor’s.
2 The practice and experience of art is as important to man as the use and knowledge of science. These two great manners of apprehending and enjoying existence are complementary, not hostile. The specific value of art for man is that it is closer to reality than science; that it is not dominated, as science must be, by-logic and reason; that it is therefore essentially a liberating activity, while science – for excellent and necessary causes – is a constricting one. Finally and most importantly it is the best, because richest, most complex and most easily comprehensible, medium of communication between human beings.
TIME AND ART
3 Art best conquers time, and therefore the nemo. It constitutes that timeless world of the full intellect (Teilhard du Chardin’s noosphere) where each artefact is contemporary, and as nearly immortal as an object in a cosmos without immortality can be.*
4 We enter the noosphere by creating, whereby we constitute it, or by experiencing, whereby we exist in it. Both functions are in communion; ‘actors’ and ‘audience’, ‘celebrants’ and ‘congregation’. For experiencing art is experiencing, among other things, that others have existed as we exist, and still exist in this creation of their existing.
5 The noosphere is equally created, of course, by great achievements in science. But the important distinction between the artefact and what we may call the scientifact is that the former, unlike the latter, can never be proved wrong. An artefact, however poor artistically, is an object in a context where proof and disproof do not exist. This is why the artefact is so much more resistant to time; the cosmogonies of ancient Mesopotamia make very little impression and have very little interest for us. They are disproved scientifacts. On the other hand the artefacts of ancient Mesopotamia retain both interest and immediacy. The great test of a scientifact is its utility now; of course utility-now is of vital importance to us and explains the priority we accord science in our world now. But disproved scientifacts – those that no longer have this utility – become mere items of interest in the history of science and the development of the human mind, items that we tend to judge by increasingly aesthetic standards; for their neatness of exposition, style, form and so forth. They become, in fact, disguised artefacts, though far less free of time and therefore less immediate and important to us than true artefacts.
6 This timelessness of the artefact has a quantitative aspect; it is of course illogical and ungrammatical to speak of one object as being more timeless than another. But our eagerness to conquer time – or to see time conquered – does lead us into this illogic. We have to be very ruthless, suppress all our intuitive feeling, to find worthless ugliness in an artefact of over a few hundred years’ age. It is true that the passage of time often constitutes a kind of selection committee; objects of beauty stand a better chance of being preserved than ugly ones. But in many cases – such as archaeological finds – we know that there was no selection committee. Ugly objects in their own age survive side by side with beautiful ones; and yet we find beauty in them all.
