The Atlantic Monthly has just published an article by Mr. R. K. Hack called 'Drift' which sets itself the task of explaining why the world is in such confusion. The true father of the essay is Mr. Chesterton, though the breed has been crossed with that peculiar hysterical pedantry which has affected Boston culture since August, 1914. Chesterton is visible not only in the vein of jocose theology and overwhelming intimacy with God but also in that famous rhetorical trick which consists in beginning with an earthly joke and ending with a divine pun. Used by Mr. Chesterton the method, when it does not rattle and creak like a penny-a-liner, often produces a flamboyant wisdom and a gorgeous playfulness. But in Mr. Hack's hands it produces screaming nonsense like his description of Hobbes as 'the great atheist, coward and logician,' and the worst case of muddle-headedness recently printed in a responsible periodical.
Mr. Hack begins by asking why we are where we are. He turns to the historians, and in two pages rejects them. The historians he has happened to read did not predict the war; therefore, says Mr. Hack, 'let us not blame them overmuch, but let us not trust them at all.' That there is a whole library of books by students of affairs which predicted the war with extraordinary accuracy Mr. Hack seems entirely unaware. He doesn't like 'historians' as a species, and he has a thesis to prove. This thesis is that we drift because we have been wrong for a century in our ideas about the function of the state and the function of science.
No doubt we have been wrong about the state and no one will quarrel with Mr. Hack for offering a homily about the evil of blind partisanship and the seriousness of indifference on the part of the ordinary citizen. But it is not carrying the diagnosis very far. Partisanship and indifference must after all have causes which cannot be controlled until they have been studied by that method which drives Mr. Hack to angry epigrams, the method known as science.
Mr. Hack's view of science is based on a simple formula. The Germans are the most scientifically trained people in the world. With science they have produced the Zeppelin which is used to kill babies. Therefore the world is idolatrous if it trusts its future to science. There is true and false science. True science deals only with things that are not 'alive.' False science includes all the studies which 'pretend to deal with living beings'--biology, psychology, sociology, philology, politics, economics, and history. These false sciences have perverted our souls, and that is why we drift.
The formula may be compressed. The Germans are science. Science is the Zeppelin. The Zeppelin is murder. Therefore, science is hell. But is it? Can any one be mad enough to argue that the development of science in the nineteenth century suddenly made mankind cruel? There were 'Huns' before the Germans, and we doubt whether Attila ever read a book on political science. No one would accuse the people who produced the massacre of St. Bartholomew or the Armenian slaughters of a passion for science. It was not 'science' which created the inquisition, the pogrom, the Roman circus, or the old days at Sing Sing. It wasn't science which demanded the burning of witches, the exposure of innocents, the conquest, rapine, and greed of human history. One wonders why a man is endowed with a mind if it leads him to believe that cruelty, greed, and delusion are new phenomena due to a century's application of ordered intelligence to experience.
Because Germany has used science so widely, it does not follow that she has used it everywhere. Indeed, it is precisely to those political ideas which have irritated the world that Germany has not applied her science. If it is true that the Emperor regards himself as a ruler by divine right, he will not find any support for the theory in modern sociology; if Professor So-and-So believes that the Teutons, whoever they may be, are a 'race' with a divine mission he is drawing upon his inner consciousness. If somebody else thinks that war is 'holy,' that is due not to the careful use of his intelligence, but to his rather eccentric notion of what is holy. If Germany had tried to conduct the technique of her com-merce and her warfare with the habit of mind in which her spokesmen often glorified her, Germany today would be as inefficient as Venezuela and as helpless as Persia.
Were Mr. Hack to take anything more than a literary interest in scientists he would soon discover that they are quite capable of reserving larger parts of their souls from analysis. They can be scientists about physics and commonplace or superstitious about politics, and that, it seems to us, is what the articulate Germans have proved themselves to be. In those areas which Mr. Hack calls 'living' they have remained romantic and obscurantist and religiously patriotic. The moral of the war is not that science has given men the Zeppelin where formerly they had to be content with the spear and the arrow, but that the scientific habit has not yet invaded those dogmas of glory and power and self-interest which are our primitive inheritance.
The political ideas which generated this war, the theories of national interest, prestige, honor, patriotism are not the products of science, but territory which science has still to conquer. The brute and the fool in mankind were not produced in the laboratory. Mr. Hack may rest assured that they are a good deal older than Newton or Darwin. Only in spots has man learned to transfigure the mud from which he rose, but that transfiguration is due to the disciplined use of his intelligence. He has hardly begun to apply his mind to politics, but the beginning is an endless promise, and it is a realization of that promise which has made this war intolerable beyond any other.
