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our duty to do good to all men is an axiom of Practical Reason, and our duty to do good to our descendants is a clear deduction from it.
Against Bacon!
This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value.
It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory.
fragments from the Tao
If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race.
If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity.
two very different kinds of criticism.
From the Confucian ‘Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you’ to the Christian ‘Do as you would be done by’ is a real advance. The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation.
But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all.
merely snatches at some one precept, on which the accidents of time and place happen to have riveted his attention, and then rides it to death—for no reason that he can give.
An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy.
Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of ‘nature’ which has hitherto been called the conscience of man?
Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but
because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.
What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.
And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive.
selective breeding,
From this point of view, what
we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
‘Man’s power over Nature’ must always and essentially be.
In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.
The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.
Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.
Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.
The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.
For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they
please.
But the manmoulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.
It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly.
Human nature has been conquered—and, of course, has conquered, in whatever sense those words may now bear.
They know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us. The question is which, if any, they should produce. No conception of good can help them to decide.
The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure.
I
am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.
Their extreme rationalism, by ‘seeing through’ all ‘rational’ motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behaviour. If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere ‘nature’) is the only course left open.
Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity.
Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.
will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness.
The Natural is the opposite of the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural.
of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes.
It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real.
The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them. We are always conquering Nature, because ‘Nature’ is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered.
But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being
who has been sacrificed are one and the same.
It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us.
We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere ‘natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will.
Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded
and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses.
A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
