Our Times

by A. N. Wilson

  Popper was the prophet of our times, one of the most influential, not least because he was one of the most intelligible, philosophers. The structures of British society were not utopian artificial constructs such as Marxian or fascist societies were, but they were closed. They were hemmed in by the same shared tribal magic. Indeed, tribal magic was one of the things which strengthen closed societies and have no place in open ones.

  One of Popper’s contentions in his philosophy was that problems are never solved without producing more problems. The economic freedom of an open society necessitated our making a collective decision: how should a society protect the victims of a free market? Popper’s answer was, broadly, social democracy: the ordering of society on more egalitarian or at least protective lines.

  As well as being a social scientist of far-reaching influence, Popper was also the foremost philosopher of science in our times. What he himself found problematic, and which his critics found incoherent in his work, was in his theory of moral value. How could an open society embrace the future and abandon the tribal magic without losing a shared common set of values? Did not an open society ineluctably suggest that values should be or become relative?

  Popper recognised the human need for a bit of tribal magic but could see it passing away. He found it helpful to divide his lucubrations about the nature of things into three worlds. World 1 was the world of physical objects, material things. World 2 was the world of the individual mind, the subjective world. What interested Popper the social scientist was World 3, the world of shared constructs, not necessarily conscious constructs, by which creatures lived together–spiders’ webs, bees’ hives, and in the human case, science, mathematics, music, art, ethical values. One might add religion, though Popper, like many thinkers of our times, had no time for religion.

  Popper was influential but not so influential as to be responsible for the development of the open society in Britain. He analysed with percipience something which was inevitably going to happen, and proposed ways forward which were not original to himself. Closed societies, monist societies, aspired to, or actually possessed, rules which were accepted by the majority. Closed society rules seem to members of an open society intolerably narrow and harsh, as was seen in the later days of our times when open society people contemplated the world-view of their comparatively recent ancestors: or of closed societies within their midst, ostracising women taken in adultery, persecuting homosexuals, chastising children, or asserting the superiority of their own race or creed. These things, all natural or innocent in a closed society, became abhorrent to an open society as it discovered its limits.

  This book is the story of how Britain had been a closed society and became an open one. The tribal magic which C. S. Lewis loved was something he could already see vanishing in 1954, just as Tolkien could see in his mythologies that the generation old enough to have fought in the First World War had witnessed its own version of a Twilight of the Gods.

  It is more agreeable to live in an open society than in a closed one, just as it is more agreeable to live in a rich society than a poor one. It would be unnecessary to write such platitudes were it not for the fact that the greater the growth of liberty in the West and the greater the prosperity, the more troubled some people became. Marxists and ex-Marxists naturally felt aggrieved and looked around for examples–there were plenty to hand–of capitalism which had become corrupt, or which was helping to cut links with the past–while ignoring capitalism’s innate tendency to make the majority of people richer. Religious people of almost all persuasions were troubled by the open society which questioned and doubted so many of its old certainties in the ethical sphere. Nostalgia–for old forms, old ceremony, old ways, old songs, old stories–what Tolkien embodied in The Lord of the Rings and Lewis saw embodied in Old Western Man–was justified, for there was never a period in history when the past, in the form, for example, of buildings and townscapes, in the form of marriage–and sexual–conventions, in the form of ethnic cohesion, was more swiftly and irrevocably swept away.

  Britain as a political entity survived in this period, but it was to be less ‘British’. Mass immigration, the injection of American culture, membership of the European Union were only three factors which warred on the sense of national identity. This sense of coming adrift from their moorings led many Britons to forms of collective mental pessimism: to a belief that overconsumption or overuse of earth’s natural resources was leading to environmental disaster, for instance, or to a belief that the country had been swallowed up by America, by foreigners, by threats of various kinds. Many of these fears were not illogical in themselves, merely in the intensity with which they touched nerves, set off in the midst of demonstrable security and prosperity the sense that society was breaking up, that Britain was doomed.

  Yet by 1986, Popper could conclude the postscript to the reissue of his autobiography, Unended Quest, by stating:

  Anyone who is prepared to compare seriously our life in our Western liberal democracies with life in other societies will be forced to agree that we have in Europe and North America, in Australia and New Zealand the best and most equitable societies that have ever existed in the whole course of human history.9

  What was it, then, which convinced so many British men and women that the truth was otherwise–that there was more ‘truth’ in the pessimism of The Lord of the Rings than in the common-sense optimism of Popper? What were they nostalgic for? A. J. P. Taylor had perkily asserted that England had risen. What made so many of its inhabitants feel that it had sunk again? Whether the following pages find an answer, the phenomenon of a national malaise remained central to the British–perhaps to the Western–psyche throughout our times, as if, during a meal where everyone is eating, drinking and making merry, a sudden silence descends and a feeling grips the company without any obvious justification that all is not well.

  2

  Space and Spies

  At a reception at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, on 4 October 1957, an usher handed an urgent message to Walter Sullivan of the New York Times. He was to telephone his office. When he came back from the telephone, he pressed excitedly through the throng, to reveal to his fellow scientist, and fellow American, Richard Porter, the news–‘It’s up!’1

  He was referring to Sputnik, the polished aluminium sphere, no bigger than a basketball, which the Soviets had projected into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 2 October. The sphere was now circumnavigating the planet at 18,000 mph, in an elliptical orbit which brought it to within 155 miles of the earth’s surface at some points, and 500 miles at others.

  Only in the nineteenth century, when European mankind abandoned the idea of a personal God or a visitable heaven, did the moon change its status. In all previous generations of human history, the moon had been a symbol, sometimes a goddess. Selene, the Greek moon, was a divinity who drove a chariot, and her love of Endymion, sung by John Keats, was the sign and type of the awakening of human imagination. The moon goddess was sometimes identified with Artemis or Diana the huntress. She controlled the fortunes of her votaries. She was mysterious, changing and changeable, and in some mythologies the actual cause of mutability itself. The Greeks had begun each year after the first appearance of the new moon at the summer solstice. The Romans divided the year into lunar months. Only in the prosaic industrial age of nineteenth-century capitalism did the moon cease to be a symbol of human dependency upon fate or the gods and become yet another territory to colonise, yet another problem for science to solve.

  In 1865 Jules Verne had published his fantasy From the Earth to the Moon, in which the passengers on this space journey are shot by a giant cannon. It was in the post–Second World War world that Verne’s fantasy seemed to be realisable. Vostok [the East] 1 was the first successful scheme for launching a man into space. It was in 1961 that the first man went into space–once again from Baikonur. Colonel Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, aged twenty-seven, was strapped into a tiny capsule 2.6 metres in d
iameter. He orbited the earth once, doing the trip in 1 hour 48 minutes. Of classically proportioned good looks, Gagarin was a hero not only in his own country but throughout the Western world, especially among the anti-American British young. His clean-shaven face, blown up to poster size, adorned the bedroom of many a teenaged suburban British girl. When his spacecraft landed, and he emerged in a potato field near Engels, he met an old peasant woman. This figure from the novels of a pre-revolutionary rural past was probably an old Orthodox babushka who believed that she was seeing an angel, but she allegedly framed her questions in science fiction terms:

  Peasant: Have you come from outer space?

  Gagarin: Just imagine it! I certainly have.

  Peasant: I was a bit scared. The man’s clothes were strange and he just appeared out of the blue. Then I saw him smile, and his smile was so good that I forgot that I was scared.2

  Whatever scientific purposes the space mission had supposedly fulfilled, its political significance was lost on no one. Before he set out, Colonel Gagarin had said, ‘To be the first to do what generations have dreamed of, the first to blaze man’s trail to the stars–name a task more complex than the one I am facing. I am not responsible to one man, or only to a score of people, or merely to all my colleagues. I am responsible to all of the Soviet people, to all mankind, to its present, to its future. And if in the face of all I am still ready for this mission, it is only because I am a Communist, inspired by the examples of unsurpassed heroism of my countrymen–the Soviet people.’ His successful return vindicated not only him, as a hero, but the whole political system which underpinned it. Such was the success of Soviet suppression of information that it was universally supposed, both within and without the Iron Curtain countries, that Gagarin’s triumph had come as a result of steady progress unmarred by disaster. There were in fact dozens of calamities. In October 1960, for example, when safety regulations were ignored trying to get a huge R-16 rocket to ignite, an explosion killed more than one hundred technicians, as well as Field Marshal Nedelin, but no one was informed. It was in fact the accident rate which eventually slowed down the pace of Soviet progress in space research and allowed the Americans to race ahead. In the first stages, however, in the 1950s, the ability to cover up mistakes was a help in the propaganda war, which the Americans appeared to be losing. And the comparative poverty of the Russians helped in the initial stages because they were compelled by necessity to keep their designs and equipment simple. Sergei Korolev, the great Soviet space scientist, used stainless steel, not aluminium or titanium, to build spaceships. They were fuelled by kerosene and liquid oxygen. They had to be small, and they were set simple objectives.

  Like the Russians, the Americans from the first saw the space race as a political race for dominance. Whereas the old myth had the moon chasing a human being, and filling him with poetic imagination and dreams, the new myth saw man chasing the moon, overpowering the virgin huntress and enlisting her in the ideological battle between dialectical materialism and market capitalism, between Lenin and Abraham Lincoln, between a state which claimed possession of an individual’s mind, while promising to nourish his or her body from cradle to the grave; and a state which proclaimed liberty but allowed the poor to die without health care or education, and which still permitted outright discrimination on grounds of race.

  Speaking to a Joint Session of Congress on 25 May 1961, the new young President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, announced, ‘I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or so expensive to accomplish.3

  Perhaps the most important word in Kennedy’s second sentence was ‘expensive’. The space race would become a chance for the Americans to bust the Soviets at the poker table. For the early 1960s, the two great monster powers were neck and neck in the space race. Trying to match the triumph of Colonel Gagarin, NASA sent Enos into space, the super-chimp who was representing the Americans, followed shortly thereafter by John Glenn, the first American human being to make the journey. In 1962, Scott Carpenter made three orbits, only to be trumped in 1963 by the daughter of a Russian tractor driver, Valentina Tereshkova, who became not only the first woman to have travelled in space but also to have notched up more hours in space in one journey in her craft, Vostok 6, than all the Americans had accomplished in the whole Mercury Programme, which had just been completed. This people’s heroine did no fewer than forty-eight orbits in one trip. By 1965, however, the Americans were beginning to pull ahead, achieving longest times in space, and longest distances traversed. It was the Russians who produced the first pictures of the lunar surface, on 3 February 1966, prompting the Americans to speed up their Apollo Mission, the project actually to land on the moon. Apollo 1 in 1967 was a disaster, in which astronauts Edward White, Virgil Grissom and Roger Chaffee were incinerated. But then the Russian spaceship Soyuz [Union] suffered a comparable disaster, and a propaganda setback occurred in 1968 when, aged thirty-four, Yuri Gagarin was killed in a plane crash. By 1969, the crew of Apollo 11 was chosen: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. Apollo 10 was the dress rehearsal, which orbited the moon. In the mission of Apollo 11, from 16 to 24 July 1969, Columbia’s CSMS Eagle flew for 8 days, 3 hours, 18 minutes and 35 seconds. It landed on the moon. On the day it did so, a bunch of flowers appeared on John F. Kennedy’s grave in Arlington Cemetery, bearing the inscription, ‘Mr President, the Eagle has landed’.4

  At 9.56:20 Houston Daylight Time, on 20 July 1969, the thirty-eight-year-old Neil Alden Armstrong from Wapakoneta, Ohio, dropped back on to the footpad of his spacecraft and lifted his left foot backwards to test the lunar soil, making furrows in the dust with the toe of his boot. Selene, Phoebe, the inviolable goddess, had been violated. Rather like spirits who, when communicating from the other side through a medium, seem capable of expressing themselves only in banalities, Neil Armstrong said, ‘That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Then Armstrong held the staff while Buzz Aldrin thrust the national flag of the United States into the surface of the moon to consummate the primary goal of the Apollo Program, the assertion of American dominance not merely of the earth but of the universe.5

  The British never had the resources to be able to compete in such a momentous race. Britain was actually the fifth nation to put a satellite into polar orbit–the Prospero, which was launched in 1971. The Ministry of Defence gave it just £9 million. Its launcher, the Black Arrow, was distantly modelled on the V2 rockets which had rained down on London in 1944. Hydrogen peroxide, water with another oxygen atom added, will, when heated sufficiently, produce a magnificently inflammable gas. Engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment worked out that a three-stage rocket, based on the Black Knight rocket, could launch a satellite weighing up to 100kg into a 300-mile orbit. After two test launches and one failure, they succeeded in launching Prospero in 1971 from the Woomera Range in Australia. The satellite was to have been named Puck who, in Shakespeare, ‘Put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes’ but the aerospace minister Frederick Corfield did not trust himself to get the name right when announcing this British technological triumph to the House of Commons. It was renamed Prospero.

  The clumsy gesture of American spacemen in helmets jabbing a flagpole into the moon dust must have reminded many British television viewers of their own Victorian past. Just such gestures had been made one hundred years earlier, in unlikely and remote places in Africa and Asia, establishing the British dominance not only of territory but of the spirit of the times. In our times, Britain was reminded of her place.

  A great intellectual and spiritual battle was in progress for the soul of the planet. As well as being the natural policeman and administrator of the world, Britain had been accustomed to thinking that it was the world’s natural moral arbi
ter. The Second World War had only confirmed this British self-perception. Had not Britain ‘stood alone’ against the darkness, when the Soviet Union had briefly allied itself to Hitler and the United States had hedged its bets before entering the conflict? British values, British decency, British fair play had ‘beaten’ the vile doctrines of the National Socialists. The British continued to glorify the early years of the Second World War, when these simplified views of things could be seen to be, roughly speaking, true, and to play down the implications of the later years of the war, when Churchill was beginning to lose his grip, when the Americans and the Russians accomplished the business not only of beating Germany, but of bankrupting Britain and dismantling the Indian Empire as part of a condition of winning the war.

  When the two giants themselves began the Cold War in the immediate post-war years, Britain was a little out of things. Of course, technically speaking, the British government and the British Foreign Office, whether the government was Attlee and his Labour Party, or Churchill and Eden with the Conservatives, was an ally of the Americans. But the metaphor of the space race was a powerful reminder of the fact that Britain could no longer afford to take part. And Suez heightened the sense Britain felt, not only that it was out of the running, but that perhaps America was not, after all, quite such a friend and ally as everyone had supposed in the days only a decade earlier, when Churchill, flown with the Victorian poet’s vision, gazed across the Atlantic with the words, ‘Westward, Look, the Land is bright!’