In Front of Your Nose Essay
Many recent statements in the press have declared that it is almost, if not quite, impossible for
us to mine as much coal as we need for home and export purposes, because of the
impossibility of inducing a sufficient number of miners to remain in the pits. One set of
figures which I saw last week estimated the annual ‘wastage’ of mine workers at 60,000 and
the annual intake of new workers at 10,000. Simultaneously with this — and sometimes in
the same column of the same paper — there have been statements that it would be
undesirable to make use of Poles or Germans because this might lead to unemployment in the
coal industry. The two utterances do not always come from the same sources, but there must
certainly be many people who are capable of holding these totally contradictory ideas in their
heads at a single moment.
This is merely one example of a habit of mind which is extremely widespread, and perhaps
always has been. Bernard Shaw, in the preface to
Androcles and the Lion
, cites as another
example the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, which starts off by establishing the
descent of Joseph, father of Jesus, from Abraham. In the first verse, Jesus is described as ‘the
son of David, the son of Abraham’, and the genealogy is then followed up through fifteen
verses: then, in the next verse but one, it is explained that as a matter of fact Jesus was
not
descended from Abraham, since he was not the son of Joseph. This, says Shaw, presents no
difficulty to a religious believer, and he names as a parallel case the rioting in the East End of
London by the partisans of the Tichborne Claimant, who declared that a British working man
was being done out of his rights.
Medically, I believe, this manner thinking is called schizophrenia: at any rate, it is the power
of holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out. Closely allied to it is the power of
igniting facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or
later. It is especially in our political thinking that these vices flourish. Let me take a few
sample subjects out of the hat. They have no organic connexion with each other: they are
merely cased, taken almost at random, of plain, unmistakable facts being shirked by people
who in another part of their mind are aware to those facts.
Hong Kong.
For years before the war everyone with knowledge of Far Eastern conditions
knew that our position in Hong Kong was untenable and that we should lose it as soon as a
major war started. This knowledge, however, was intolerable, and government after
government continued to cling to Hong Kong instead of giving it back to the Chinese. Fresh
troops were even pushed into it, with the certainty that they would be uselessly taken
prisoner, a few weeks before the Japanese attack began. The war came, and Hong Kong
promptly fell — as everyone had known all along that it would do.
Conscription.
For years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of
standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to
make such a stand effective. I know very well the arguments that are put forward in defence
of this attitude; some of them are justified, but in the main they are simply forensic excuses.
As late as 1939, the Labour Party voted against conscription, a step which probably played its
part in bringing about the Russo-German Pact and certainly had a disastrous effect on morale
in France. Then came 1940 and we nearly perished for lack of a large, efficient army, which
we could only have had if we had introduced conscription at least three years earlier.
The Birthrate.
Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and enlightenment were held
to be almost synonymous. To this day, the majority of people argue — the argument is
variously expressed, but always boils down to more or less the same thing — that large
families are impossible for economic reasons. At the same time, it is widely known that the
birthrate is highest among the low-standard nations, and, in our population, highest among
the worst-paid groups. It is also argued that a smaller population would mean less
unemployment and more comfort for everybody, while on the other hand it is well
established that a dwindling and ageing population is faced with calamitous and perhaps
insoluble economic problems. Necessarily the figures are uncertain, but it is quite possible
that in only seventy years our population will amount to about eleven millions, over half of
whom will be Old Age Pensioners. Since, for complex reasons, most people don't want large
families, the frightening facts can exist some where or other in their consciousness,
simultaneously known and not known.
U.N.O.
In order to have any efficacy whatever, a world organization must be able to override
big states as well as small ones. It must have power to inspect and limit armaments, which
means that its officials must have access to every square inch of every country. It must also
have at its disposal an armed force bigger than any other armed force and responsible only to
the organization itself. The two or three great states that really matter have never even
pretended to agree to any of these conditions, and they have so arranged the constitution of
U.N.O. that their own actions cannot even be discussed. In other words, U.N.O.'s usefulness
as an instrument of world peace is nil. This was just as obvious before it began functioning as
it is now. Yet only a few months ago millions of well-informed people believed that it was
going to be a success.
There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing
things which we
know
to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently
twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this
process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps
up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have
to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the
press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing
of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can
utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his
democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical
words.
Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the
same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than
everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant
meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in
the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact
between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result
of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return
home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds.
The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to
see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it
is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about
important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one
may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even
when one makes a correct one, to discover
why
one was right can be very illuminating. In
general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes
this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one's subjective feelings, but one can to some extent
insulate them from one's thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of
arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's
weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-
atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole
or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and
absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political
opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.
