Book the Fourth
The Political Life of Edward Albert Tewler


Chapter the First and Last
Political Animals?

THE PRECEDING BOOK in the life of Edward Albert Tewler has been a long one. Now by way of relief the reader shall have a very short one. And the air of it will be free from that flavour of indelicacy which is unhappily so inseparable from a truthful rendering of sexual life.

It is necessary, if this monograph is to be complete, that a statement of Aristotle’s should be considered, and this again involves a certain qualified tribute to the contribution of that outstanding figure to the entanglement of human thought. He looms large in the history of the mind, so that millions who have never heard more of him than his name, treat it with an almost superstitious respect. He devised a logical process that ignored the universal uniqueness of events, fixed species, which nevertheless fluctuate eternally, and substitute^ dogmatic generalisation for protean truth. Later, he drifted away from this towards the systematic collection and record of fact, but the syllogism of the young Aristotle remained to hamper the human mind, and bookish scholars in monastic cells, unable and unwilling to go out and observe and experiment further, made the hasty accumulations of the old Aristotle their test of reality instead of carrying on with his marshalling of knowledge.

As Christian teaching developed its Creeds after the conversion of Constantine, it appropriated the intellectual prestige of Aristotle, and, until Roger Bacon made his shrill and passionate protests, the church kept the mind aloof from the ever-changing realities about him. So through the Early Dark Ages, the genus Homo blundered along dismally and dirtily, learning next to nothing by experience and suffering. All of which will be expanded further in the Sixth Book of this complete and veracious study of a sample contemporary man. For in his generation, Edward Albert was the heir to it all. It had gone to his making and limitation even though he knew nothing about it. And so it is with all of us. None of us would have been what we are if Aristotle had never lived, to mark and fix a cardinal error in the bewilderment of human thought.

This passing tribute to the outstanding classic is paid prematurely here, because it is the necessary setting for one of his uncorrected inaccuracies, in all its unmitigated and unjustifiable assurance. “Man,” said he, without qualification, “is a political animal.”

Now this is neither wholly false nor wholly true. It is false in so far as Homo Tewler does not behave as a political animal should do, participating with the utmost fullness in the collective life of the polis, but it is true in the sense that his life is inseparable from that collective life and that he cannot escape from it, whatever he does to detach himself. Even your misanthropical recluse still contributes an implicit or outspoken criticism to the general life. So that if we qualify Aristotle and say that man is an inadequately Political Animal, we can accept his statement.

The polls of Aristotle was a city state, but now the human community has expanded, function by function, irregularly and confusedly, to a Cosmopolis — the whole human species. A man belongs now to a hundred different systems of relationship overlapping one another; a hundred different loyalties claim him; but comprehending all of them now and growing continually more insistent is our common humanity. No one can escape the common fate that awaits our species as a whole, but so far few of us apprehend as much, and still fewer have roused themselves to do anything about it. We are in the ship of human destiny but we have very little control of it, We still treat our cabins as separate ships. (My metaphor is faulty but my intention is manifest.) The polls has us but we fail to take hold of the polis.

Aristotle’s conception of political possibility never ranged beyond the city state or a league of city states, because in his time the progressive abolition of distance was inconceivable. But the Greek idea embodied in his expression “Political Animal”, the treatment of the words “city” and “citizens” as reciprocal terms, the distinction between civilised and barbaric expansion as the difference between the extended city on the one hand, and, on the other, conquest and the exaction of tribute, “cooperation” and homage, has been a working opposition throughout the ages down to our own time. Rome did not begin as an Imperium. The initial idea of the Roman Republic was not an idea of conquest but assimilation; from Scotland to Samarkand men could become citizens of the city of Rome. Invention and discovery have now expanded the polis of Aristotle to Cosmopolis, the Barbarian is a mere gangster, a savage brought within the compass of the city, all war is crime and civil war, and it is by, through and in a world-order that we live or fail to live today. Manifestly, then, our Edward Albert Tewler and his neighbours in Morningside Prospect at the heart of a cosmic time bomb, must, like everybody else in the world now, display man as a Political Animal, however unawakened he may be to the real extent of the Cosmopolis.

Considered as an assembly of Political Animals, the tenants of Morningside Prospect displayed the same quality of discreet reluctance towards harsh realities that was also manifest in their religious and philosophical attitudes. Then citizenship was a sleeping partnership. They were not pressing or attacking in these matters, so that they do not complicate our study by advancing ideas of their own“and attempting to change the world in any way whatever. This simplifies them very conveniently for our purpose. A single declared Fascist or Communist or Jehovah’s Witness or Single Taxer or Douglasite, for example, would have put us askew by orienting the entire Prospect to his complex of ideas and setting them organising and resisting for or against it. He would have concentrated attention like a hornet come into a roomful of quiet people. But suchlike disturbers of the peace were far away, a distant buzzing, and the word “Bawls” protected this place of rest as effectively as an angel with a flaming fiery sword.

The whole of Morningside Prospect had made its peace with God, and it felt that if you didn’t annoy God, He could be trusted not to annoy you. The faint flavour of Rome that hung about that biretta and soutane excused any persistent church going. Which would not have occurred anyhow. There would always have been some faint flavour or other in extenuation. One or two of the ladies “communicated” at Easter and assisted with the decorations at Harvest Thanksgiving. If some Buzzer had got through with whispers of unbelief, Morningside Prospect would not have argued, it would have “stood up” for God simply and firmly. If on the other hand the Redeemer of Mankind, whose authentic portraits adorned quite a number of the Prospect bedrooms, had appeared, true to those pictures, white-robed and radiant) Morningside Prospect would have quietly gone indoors, fastened the door, and watched this intrusive anachronism discreetly from behind a blind, apprehensive of any little miracles that might occur. A few with memories of their early Sunday school lessons might have felt anxious about Mrs Rooter’s fig tree at the end of the row, because He was notoriously hasty with fig trees, and hers was notoriously barren.

So much for the religion of Morningside. Its attitude towards Nature was equally passive. The Prospect had dismissed any curiosity it had ever possessed about Nature, It had decided that Nature also was quite trustworthy if you didn’t mess about with her. There were the Secrets of Nature, but no decent person ever dreamt of raising her skirts. There were the Wonders of Nature, but there was no need to pry into them. You just said they were wonderful. You went out and looked up at the stars on a starry night. You remained still for a time. “It makes you think,” you said profoundly, and thought no more about it.

But Politics wasn’t so easily dismissed. There were rates to pay and they had a tendency to go up; there were taxes which rose steadily. There were municipal and parliamentary elections. People put handbills into the letter-boxes and canvassers came round and asked Morningside Prospect questions at which the Prospect shook its head in an enigmatical manner. It had no taste for doorstep arguments. When a general election loomed up, the public disturbance was considerable, and Morningside Prospect was forced to share it. It broke into speech. Views were exchanged, at golf and over garden fences; newspapers with marke............