Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

It would seem that Britain, perhaps more than any other European country except Sweden, is passing through a critical phase where it does not know what it wants or what it should seek. The patterns of outlook and behavior that brought it to world leadership by 1880 were going to seed by 1938. There was sufficient vitality still left in them to bring forth the magnificent effort of 1940-1945, but since 1945 it has become clear that the old patterns are not adapted to success in the contemporary world of technocracy, operations research, rationalization, and mass mobilization of resources. The British method of operating through a small elite, coordinated by leisurely personal contact and shared outlooks, and trained in the humanities, cannot handle the problems of the late twentieth century. Britain has the quality to do this, for, as we have seen, operations research, jet engines, radar, and many of the technological advances that helped create the contemporary world originated in Britain; but these things must be available on a mass basis for any country wishing to retain a position of substantial world leadership today, and they cannot be made available in Britain on a quantity basis by any continuation of the patterns of training and recruitment used by Britain in the nineteenth century.

There are those who say in all sincerity that there is no need for Britain to seek to retain a position of leadership that would require it to destroy everything that made the country distinctive. These people are prepared to abandon world leadership, international influence, and economic expansion for the sake of preserving the late nineteenth-century patterns of life and society. But pressures from outside as well as from within make this impossible. Lycurgus renounced social change in prehistoric Sparta only by militarizing the society. Britain certainly cannot refuse to change and at the same time hope to retain the leisurely, semiaristocratic, informally improvising social structure of its recent past. The outside world is not prepared to allow this, and, above all, the mass of British people will not allow it. In fact, the reluctance of the Conservative Party under Macmillan to face up to this problem has pushed a large number of British voters, reluctantly, toward the Labour Party. As a result, Labour won the election of October 1964 by a bare majority of the House of Commons.

It is widely agreed that Britain’s problems in facing the contemporary world fall under two headings: (a) a rather complacent lack of enterprise and (b) an educational system that is not adapted to the contemporary world. The lack of enterprise is rooted in the self-satisfied attitude of the established elite, especially in their rather unimaginative attitude toward industry and business. For example, at the time that the Volkswagen was sweeping the American small-car import markets, the British Motor Corporation had in the Morris Minor a car that was slightly inferior in a few points, superior on several important points, and sold for several hundred dollars less, yet no real effort was made by the British firm to fight for a share of the American market.

Critics of contemporary England tend to concentrate their fire on the educational system, which, despite great changes, remains inadequate, in the sense that large numbers of young people are not being trained for the tasks that have to be done, especially for teaching itself. To be sure, Britain has provided about three billion dollars on new educational buildings since the war, with about a hundred thousand more teachers, an extension in the school-leaving age of about eighteen months, and a sixfold increase in opportunities for higher education (with new universities being established in provincial towns almost yearly); but the subjects studied, the methods used, and the attitudes toward these are not directed toward the needs of the future world; no real coordination or ready access is provided between the educational system and the world of action, and access to either by the ordinary Englishman remains restricted by social and economic barriers.

Instead of the gradual elimination of those who are unwilling to study, such as operates in theory in France and to a lesser extent in the United States, Britain still has barriers at ages eleven and eighteen that shunt the major part of the country’s young people into terminating and specialized curricula, and do so on largely irrelevant criteria, such as ability to pay or social background. A survey of more than four thousand children, reported by Thomas Pakenham in The Observer , concluded that “the 11-plus examination and our selective educational system itself are seriously biased in favour of middle-class children and against virtually all those from poorer families.” Using I.Q. tests that are themselves biased in favor of middle-class children, the survey showed that of all eight-year-old children with I.Q.’s of 105, only 12 percent of lower-class children were subsequently able to get to grammar schools, while 46 percent of those from the middle class could get to grammar schools (and thus get access to a curriculum preparing for college). Of eight-year-olds with I.Q.’s of 111, 30 percent from the lower class but 60 percent of a higher social background subsequently reached grammar school. And of those exceptional children with I.Q.’s above 126, about 82 percent of both social levels get to grammar school.

These figures are taken from a recent volume, edited by Arthur Koestler, entitled Suicide of a Nation? (Hutchinson, 1963). The significance of the volume does not rest so much in what it says as in the fact that a team of writers, including Koestler, Hugh Seton-Watson, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cyril Connolly, Austen Albu, M.P., Henry Fairlie, John Mander, Michael Shanks, and others, could contribute to a volume with the rhetorical title borne by this one. Several of these writers apply to the ruling groups of contemporary Britain the designation that Gilbert Murray, more than a generation ago, taught their elders to use with reference to ancient Athens: “a failure of nerve.” There may indeed be a failure of nerve in both historical cases, but there is equally evident a failure of imagination and of energy. For the Britain that won glory in World War II had many opportunities to do great things in the postwar period but failed to do so because its leaders were unwilling to grasp the opportunity.

On the whole, the two contending political parties in Britain continue to offer the mass of English voters opposing visions that have no real appeal to the great majority of English, and, at the same time, show an obvious disinclination to take drastic action to realize these visions, probably because party leaders know that their views are repugnant to the majority.

These two opposed visions offer, on the one hand, the nostalgic yearnings of the Conservatives for the world of 1908 and, on the other side, the state Socialism and unilateral disarmament of the Labour Party doctrinaires. Neither of these has much to contribute to the real problems facing Britain in the last half of the twentieth century, which is why the mass of British voters, who can detect irrelevance even when they themselves have no clear knowledge of what is relevant, have little enthusiasm for either. The Conservative standpatters were challenged by a number of vigorous and able veterans of World War II, such as Iain Macleod, Peter Thorneycroft, Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham), Reginald Maudling, Enoch Powell, Ted Heath, and others. These were essentially empiricists, but they wanted Conservatism to make an active attack on Britain’s problems and to make their party more appealing to the great mass of Englishmen by associating it with vigor and a social conscience.

In one way or another, Macmillan was able to sidetrack all of these, to derail the traditional leader of the older aristocratic Conservative families, Lord Salisbury, and to block other significant contenders for control of the party such as R. A. Butler. In fact, Macmillan’s eagerness to avoid decisions or activity in matters concerned with the welfare of the country was exceeded only by his activity in consolidating his own personal power in the party. In some ways, notably in his insatiable yearning for power, his skill in concealing this fact, and his evident lack of any very rigid principles on other matters, Macmillan recalled his predecessor, Baldwin. Both had the same pose as typical country squires and both had Oxford University closer to their hearts than any other public issue. But where Baldwin was lethargic and relatively sensitive, Macmillan was active and secretly ruthless, quite willing, apparently, to disrupt the Establishment or the party itself to further his personal position and his surprisingly narrow social interests. This was seen in his last-minute, successful, campaign against Sir Oliver Franks for the honorary position of Chancellor of Oxford University in 1960 and in the way in which, operating from a hospital bed in 1963, he pushed aside all other claimants to be his successor as prime minister to put into that office the fourteenth Earl of Home, Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home. This disregard of tradition, of the lines of expected procedure, of the claims of past service and cooperation, and, above all, of the expectations of public opinion in order to raise a man whose chief claim seemed to many to be based on long lineage was a fair commentary on Macmillan’s attitude toward his office and his party. Its influence on the morale of the party itself cannot be assessed, but it cannot have been a good one.