The Public Philosophy > Chapter VIII. The Eclipse of the Public Philosophy > On the Efficacy of Ideas
There are those who would say, using the words of philosophers to prove it, that it is the characteristic illusion of the tender-minded that they believe in philosophy. Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach and theorize. And being theorists by profession, they exaggerate the efficacy of ideas, which are mere airy nothings without mass or energy, the mere shadows of the existential world of substance and of force, of habits and desires, of machines and armies.
Yet the illusion, if it were one, is inordinately tenacious. It is impossible to remove it from the common sense in which we live and have our being. In the familiar daylight world we cannot act as if ideas had no consequences. The whole vast labor and passion of public life would be nonsense if we did not believe that it makes a difference what is done by parties, newspapers, books, broadcasts, schools and churches. All their effort would be irrelevant, indeed nonsense, like an argument about what Nebuchadnezzar should be served for tomorrow morning's breakfast.
The most thoroughgoing skeptic is unable, in practice, to make a clean sweep - to say that since ideas have no consequences there is no such thing as a good idea or a bad one, a true idea or a false one. For there is no escaping the indubitable fact of experience that we are often mistaken, and that it makes a difference to have been wrong.
The chemistry of our bodies is never mistaken. The reaction of one chemical element to another chemical element is always correct, is never misled by misinformation, by untruth, and by illusion. The doctor can be mistaken about the chemistry of his patient, having failed to detect a substance which falsifies his diagnosis. But it is only the doctor who can be wrong; the chemical process cannot be.
Why do men make mistakes? Because an important part of human behavior is reaction to the pictures in their heads. Human behavior takes place in relation to a pseudo-environment - a representation, which is not quite the same for any two individuals, of what they suppose to be - not what is - the reality of things.
This man-made, this cultural environment, which has its being in the minds of men, is interposed between man as a biological organism and the external reality. It is in this realm that ideas are efficacious. They are efficacious because men react to their ideas and images, to their pictures and notions of the world, treating these pictures as if they were the reality.
The airy nothings in the realm of essence are efficacious in the existential world when a man, believing it to be true or good, treats the idea as if it were the reality. In this way faith in an idea can quite literally remove a mountain. To be sure no man's idea can remove a mountain on the moon. But if the American people took it into their heads that life would not be worth living until Pike's Peak was in the suburbs of Chicago, they could move Pike's Peak. They could do it if they and their descendants were sufficiently devoted to the idea for a long enough time.
Nothing would happen to Pike's Peak if the idea of removing it were merely proclaimed and celebrated. The idea would have to become, like the idea of winning a war, the object and the focus of the nation's energies.
Then the idea would operate in the minds of men who voted, who planned, who would engineer the undertaking, who would raise the money, would recruit the labor, would procure the equipment, and - shall we say - would suppress the mounting resistance of the objectors to the project.
Because ideas have the power to organize human behavior, their efficacy can be radical. They are indeed radical when, as the image of what a man should be, they govern the formation of his character and so imprint a lasting organization on his behavior. Because the images of man are the designs of the molds in which characters are formed, they are of critical concern. What is the image of the good king, the good courtier, the good subject - of the good master and of the good slave – of the good citizen, the good soldier, the good politician, the good boss, the good workingman? The images matter very much. The ones which prevail will govern education. The ideas of what men should be like become efficacious in the existential world because, as they are imposed by the family, the school and the community, they cause men to "acquire the kind of character which makes them want to act in the way they have to act as members of the society or of a special class within it." They learn "to desire what, objectively, it is necessary for them to do," and ~outer force is . . . replaced by" the "inner compulsion" of their own characters.
That there are limits to education in this sense, we cannot doubt. But we do not know where they are. There is, that is to say, no clear and certain boundary between character which is acquired and those more or less uneducable traits of human nature, evolved during the long ages and transmitted by inheritance. We are quite unable to predict with any certainty or precision how far the individual pupil is educable - or rather how far he is still educable by the time a particular educator gets hold of him, and after he has already acquired a character of sorts in his infancy.
Yet, however crude and clumsy our knowledge of the process, there is no doubt that a character is acquired by experience and education. Within limits that we have not measured, human nature is malleable. Can we doubt it when we remember that when Shakespeare was alive there were no Americans, that when Virgil was alive there were no Englishmen, and that when Homer was alive there were no Romans? Quite certainly, men have acquired the ways of thinking, feeling and acting which we recognize as their ethnic, national, class and occupational characteristics. Comparatively speaking these characteristics are, moreover, recently acquired. Even within the brief span of historical time characters have been acquired and have been lost and have been replaced by other characters. This is what gives to man's history, despite his common humanity, its infinite variety.
Because human nature is, as Hocking puts it, "the most plastic part of the living world, the most adaptable, the most educable," ~ it is also the most mal-adaptable and mis-educable. The cultural heritage which contains the whole structure and fabric of the good life is acquired. It may be rejected. It may be acquired badly. It may not be acquired at all. For we are not born with it. If it is not transmitted from one generation to the next, it may be lost, indeed forgotten through a dark age, until somewhere and somehow men rediscover it, and, exploring the world again, recreate it anew.
The acquired culture is not transmitted in our genes, and so the issue is always in doubt. The good life in the, good society, though attainable, is never attained and possessed once and for all. So what has been attained will again be lost if the wisdom of the good life in a good society is not transmitted.
That is the central and critical condition of the Western society: that the democracies are ceasing to receive the traditions of civility in which the good society, the liberal, democratic way of life at its best, originated and developed. They are cut off from the public philosophy and the political arts which are needed to govern the liberal democratic society. They have not been initiated into its secrets, and they do not greatly care for as much of it as they are prepared to understand.
In Toynbee's terrible phrase, they are proletarians who are "in" but are not "of' the society they dominate.