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The Modern Dilemma. Syllabus for Four BBC Broadcasts
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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One important characteristic of the “problems of the present time” – as it appears at least, to us who are concerned with them – is that they do not form a list of separate problems each to be dealt with by the appropriate specialist; but we feel instinctively before we have even thought about them, that they form together one single problem, affecting the interests of the whole of humanity. Our difficulties [are] those of an age which feels the need of synthesis. Hence anyone who thinks seriously about contemporary affairs, whatever be his special vocation or competence, is led to the same ultimate questions. (That at least is my own excuse for discussing matters which at first sight lie outside of my own profession and my own knowledge). Our age [is] not afflicted by the collapse of religious belief, but by something much more serious in its possible consequences – the collapse of religious disbelief. A period during which religion is decaying is comparatively easy to live in. People who are engaged in work of destruction can easily be satisfied with themselves; for some small, though usually conspicuous part of what they are destroying is something that ought to be destroyed, and, it is of this part that they are most aware. They can, therefore, call their destructive work by the name of enlightenment and progress. A child employs itself happily in taking an old alarm clock to pieces, but even a child is disappointed when all the parts are separate and it finds that it cannot put the clock together again. In a dissociative and analytic period each man has his own little job of taking something to pieces, a job which is not beyond his powers. One characteristic of our time is that we are dimly aware that the work to be done seems beyond our powers. That, we feel is because the old distinctions of function are now confused. The work of the good statesman of tomorrow has wider scope, and demands more fundamental understanding than the work of the best statesman of yesterday. The modern scientist has a much more delicate task than that of the old fashioned rationalist. The artist and the man of letters is impelled to question the nature of [his] function, and to ask himself what he is doing and why and how it fits in with the work of the rest of the world.
I begin, therefore, with the activity which I may be assumed to know most about – that of writing poetry. Often claimed that poetry is, or should be, concerned with permanent things, and not with affairs of the day; on the other hand, it is sometimes asserted that the poet is the consciousness of his time and makes other men more conscious.