Anybody who is familiar with the Jewish Christian Bible knows that it’s very largely a collection of sermons. Especially those parts of the Bible that are called prophetic books consist, to a very considerable extent, of warnings and denunciations concerning the grave consequences which will follow from disobedience to the divine law and the will of God. And the interesting thing, historically, about all these prophecies—those, for example, of Hosea, Amos, Jeremiah one thinks of particularly—is that they were disregarded. And the books are, in a way, prophetic because the doom which they foresaw came about—in other words, the overthrow of the rather feeble Hebrew political units by their powerful Assyrian and Babylonian enemies.

This carries on too into that part of the Bible that is called by Christians the New Testament, where, again, we have a kind of literature that is very largely prophetic in style, culminating as it does in the end of the New Testament in the apocalypse, the revelation of St. John. This tremendous warning of an impending doom which will come about if men do not mend their ways. And it seems, you see, that men never do mend their ways; that the prophets talk, the warning goes unheeded. And this has a peculiar poignancy for our own time, when prophets are talking about doom as they’ve never talked before.

So let’s go back a few years. I very well remember my own involvement in all sorts of political activity in England shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. This was not so long after the publication of the famous war book, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. And that was followed not long after by a far more sensational book called What Would Be the Character of a New War? All these books constituted a kind of horror literature, describing in the most vivid terms for the benefit of those who hadn’t actually been involved in these experiences the ghastliness, the evil, the degradation and depravity that war involves. The book that I mentioned—What Would Be the Character of a New War?—was the most sensational description of things that later actually happened, such as the bombardments of Tokyo and Cologne.

And about the same time—that is to say: during the 1930s, before these things were closed down by authority in Japan—there was being shown all over Japan propaganda films sponsored largely by peace organizations. Films that had been taken of the First World War, showing in total frankness and detail the mutilation of human beings that resulted. The net effect of this whole propaganda—which was very widely circulated—the net effect of this grey warning was, as we know, nil. We went ahead, we disregarded the prophets, and endured the horror.

For it seems that in all this kind of warning we produce nothing more than the effect that comes upon many of us when we look down from great heights: we feel a strange dizziness, a subtle temptation to throw ourselves over, a sensation of weakening in the grasp of the fingers. For there is some peculiar fascination in the depiction of doom and horror. It’s the same problem, for example, that arose in the Christian presentation of life as a great and momentous choice between eternal damnation and eternal life. You have but one life in which to make this choice. And therefore, everything that you do assumes a peculiar and vivid and startling importance. You mustn’t, on the one hand, be too confident that you will be saved, because to do that would be to commit the sin of presumption. On the other hand, you mustn’t give up hope and simply assume that you’ll be damned, for that is the opposite sin of despair. You walk a tightrope in between, in a perpetual state of anxiety.

And anxiety is encouraged. In the same way that today, for example, in sales organizations, the salesman has a quota. And if he makes his quota, his quota is constantly upped so that he’s kept in a perpetual state of anxiety, on the theory that this will keep him fascinated, keep him interested in the task of working. And so, in exactly the same way, in this depiction of man’s destiny that we have in Christianity, the perpetual state of uncertainty as to whether you will be saved or whether you will be damned is to keep one on one’s spiritual toes. But the reaction of many people to this kind of thing is that the anxiety of uncertainty is too much to take. It would be better to make peace with doom, to know at least for certain that you will be damned and you won’t have to take the strain of wondering whether you will or you won’t be.

The same sort of situation arose in—going back again to a comparison between the First and Second World Wars—in the First World War there were many cases of shell shock. And in the following years it had been shown that psychoanalysis could have some therapeutic effect on the victims of shell shock. And at the outbreak of the Second World War, Anna Freud had set up a very large clinic in London to deal with expected cases of shell shock. And in the Great Crisis of Dunkirk and the evacuation of France, when London, too, was under the force of the Blitz, to everybody’s astonishment there were very, very few cases of shell shock. And the reason seemed to be that there was no escape from the situation. In other words, under circumstances of warfare where you could be evacuated, where you could go home and get out of it, people succumbed to shell shock. That is to say: there was a choice You could possibly get out of this thing. And if you could get out of it, there was anxiety: shall I stay in, or shall I stay out? Anxiety always surrounds a decision. But under the later circumstances there was absolutely no way of getting out of the trouble. Blighty or home was just as much under bombardment as the front line. There was no escape from the situation at all. And therefore, in this sense. you knew you were damned; you knew you had to endure this, there was no way of getting out. And so the cases of shell shock didn’t occur. This is only saying it’s simply an observation on human psychology that we have a certain preference for certainty, even if the certainty be dismal and horrible, over uncertainty as to whether we are going the happy way or the way of horror.

Now, the prophet, the preacher, in pointing out the possible doom of horror, creates precisely this state of uncertainty. Because he’s saying that if you will do these things, you can avoid it. If you will do your duty, if you will do the will of God, if you will follow the course of reason, you will get out of this situation—which he proceeds to depict in the most vivid terms that he can in order to terrorize people into being reasonable.

But it seems to me that—as I’ve already suggested—over the whole history of the use of this kind of propaganda that there is absolutely no evidence to commend it as an effective tool. People are more fascinated by the description of doom than they are dissuaded from it. And I think all but those who are interested in persuading human beings, in trying to establish the councils of reason, ought to recognize at this point in history that the technique of old-fashioned prophecy, the technique of preaching, simply has not worked.

I suppose we can take a lesson from the advertising people. Probably those advertisements which attract and promise something highly desirable are more effective than those which utter warnings. It’s true, of course, that people will be persuaded, say, to fork out tax money under circumstances of national danger rather than in times of peace. Fear somehow unites human beings to do things—in the words of the poet Laurence Binyon in a rather sentimental poem about the First World War. He says:

The cares we hugged dropped out of vision.

Our hearts with deeper thoughts dilate.

We step from the days of sour division

Into the grandeur of our fate.

But those are poems which praise the virtues of action when it’s all too late; action in the circumstances of a crisis which can no longer be avoided. A crisis into which we have fallen, and our falling has not been prevented, but perhaps assisted by all the talk of the doom for which we were headed.

Now, it seems to me that this theory of persuasion rests on another theory that’s less conscious. It rests ultimately on the theory that there is a divorce between human reason and human passions. That, in other words, the instinctual or organic or physiological organization of man is something, on the one hand, which is inherently selfish and stupid, but that somehow or other we have been endowed with a faculty of reason opposed to the stupid and blind cravings of the organism. And that the task of being civilized is to make the blindness and the passions of the human organism responsive to the voice of reason.

Now, note this: that—although this is a current attitude, a current feeling, about man’s nature and man’s task—that when the prophet speaks, he doesn’t speak entirely with the voice of reason. He appeals to fear. And a great deal of his argument consists not really in argument, in rational discourse at all, but in the depiction of horrible consequences of things that may happen if we don’t do what’s reasonable. Very, very rarely is the prophet a lover of mankind in the sense—every lover (in the sexual sense of the word) is a wooer. And very rarely, hardly ever in the whole literature of philosophy and religion, does one come across a prophet who, instead of warning, instead of trying to change people by threatening them, tries to change them by wooing them.

In Greek mythology, of course, Orpheus stands for the art of wooing the magician with his music, who makes the mountaintops and the trees bow to him, who pacifies the most ferocious animal with the magic of his harp. The only thing like this that seems to exist in the Hebrew Christian tradition is David playing his harp to calm the madness of King Saul. But otherwise, the prophets threaten. They are father types, I suppose, who want to impose order and seemly behavior upon their children by shouting and ranting, perhaps as distinct from mother types who manage to do the same thing by cooing and gentleness. But this appeal to the element in man that we might call Eros, as distinct from Logos, doesn’t seem to have been tried by the prophets at all.

And it’s interesting that this seems also true of people in our own time who are great exponents of the power of non-violence. One thinks of Gandhi. On thinks of the astonishing work of the Quakers. And yet here, too, something has gone wrong, especially in the case of Gandhi. Here is this extraordinary man who appealed to the conscience of the British in the most effective way by his whole policy of non-violence. But the end result of Gandhi’s work is, alas, another nation with its independent divisive government, its armed forces, and so on and so forth. This is the end of it all.

These idealists, although we admire them, although in their presence we feel a little lacking, a little irresponsible, a little guilty, they don’t really move us. Because they appeal to a sense of reason and to a sense of duty which doesn’t move the whole man because it is separated from the whole man. It is the result of thinking of man as an opposition, as passion and lust and greed and self-interest on the one hand, and then—coming clearly out of the clouds—duty, rationality, and so on on the other hand.

Now, first of all, isn’t it obvious that the sense of reason is not something that we have as a sort of gift from a supernatural world entirely removed from our natural and physical state? The possibility of reasoning is a function of the human brain. Reason, therefore, is not, as it were, something that comes from another world to be the master of our animal appetites, but rather reason has been developed in the process of evolution to serve our animal appetites. It is the intelligence of those appetites themselves, because obviously, if a simple appetite expresses itself without any sort of feedback, without any sort of information as to what it’s doing, it can, for example, eat up its environment in short order and leave nothing on which to sustain itself. The possibility of some system of information, some kind of feedback which comes back to the appetite, says, “Now go easy. You don’t need to eat that much right now, and if you’ll just conserve yourself a bit and control yourself a bit, you can renew the crops, organize your sources of food supply, and eat later on.” And in this sense, then, reason operates as the creation and as the servant of what Freud would call Eros or libido: the pleasure principle.

But when we’ve got a culture like ours, which has somehow confused the hierarchy of things, which instead of seeing logos or reason as the servant of Eros, the instrument of Eros wants to make it its master. It’s very often said, and used to be said in political circles, that the expert should be a person who is not on top, but on tap. This is the same with the situation of reason to the human organism as a whole. Reason is an expert whose position is to be that of a servant, not that of a master. Because when reason becomes the master, we get a situation in which the goals of life become increasingly antithetical to the interests of man—to the interests, that is to say, of man as a human organism.

Obviously, when an office of a great corporation is organized on a basis of pure efficiency, it becomes an absolutely hideous place in which to work. Yes, clearly, from a rational point of view, the purpose of a corporation is to make money. And everything that obstructs the making of money is—from, again, this rational point of view—something to be discarded. But actually, if you set up a business on those lines, nobody wants to work there. It becomes a regimented, almost sort of a jail situation, if there is no opportunity, if everybody is watched, if they can’t go out and drink coffee when they feel like it, if they have to punch clocks and feel treated as machines, they have no enthusiasm at all for the work being done. It’s the same situation with research: comes out much more strongly here. You cannot order, you cannot regiment, the creative inventor. And if you want him to work for you, you have to trust him. But the same principle applies to everybody. It applies to the most ordinary menial drudge: that if you want him to work well, your incentive for him to do so must not be the fear of what will happen if he doesn’t. Otherwise, if he doesn’t punch that clock at the right moment, he’ll be fired. You have to attract him. You have to woo him.

It seems to me this is just the plainest kind of horse sense, and yet this has never been applied in any important way in either the religious or the political spheres. Those who come to speak, as it were, on behalf of God, and to turn mankind from selfishness to the love of his fellows, or to the love of the divine reality behind the world, the total organism of the world, or whatever you want to call it—they all shout and scream and stamp, instead of trying to draw a picture that is attractive, that woos.

I think one of the most extraordinary examples of this are the illustrations—I’m going to cite two examples. One, first of all, familiar to all of you: Walt Disney’s film Fantasia. You remember at the end of that, there is a sequence which consists, first of all, of the Night on the Bald Mountain of Mussorgsky, followed by Schubert’s Ave Maria, representing respectively the powers of darkness and the powers of light. The sequence of the Night on the Bald Mountain, where the illustration and animation was done largely by that extraordinarily imaginative artist Kay Nielsen, is absolutely fascinating. Walpurgisnacht, the revel of the devils, is one of the most powerful pieces of popular cartoon movie. Thrilling! But then, when that breaks up and we come instead to something that will represent the vision of goodness, what do we get? We get Schubert’s Ave Maria, which is the most sentimental, sloppy stuff. And instead of all these powerful images of dancing devils and writhing limbs, we get processions of anonymous monks carrying candles through a forest that looks vaguely like a Gothic cathedral. It’s completely insipid.

Well so, in the same way, in—what’s his name? The French artist whose name just escapes me at the moment. Did a lot of illustrations and engravings for the Dante Divino Commedia. And the illustrations for the Inferno are magnificent. They show the greatest imagination. Here are really terrible situations, marvelously drawn. But what happens when we get to the Paradiso? What is supposed to be the world of divine bliss is illustrated by nothing but star-like circlings of angels in pale nighties, circling in the sky—with no imagination at all. Absolutely dreary.

We seem, then, to be far more fascinated by the darkness than by the light. The news in our daily papers—and, after all, the news that’s printed in the paper is printed there not because it’s the news, but because it sells the papers. And the news that seems to sell the papers is the news of crime and murder and so on. Good news is no news. Why? I think it’s because we have not yet developed the skill to write about the good news in a way that excites imagination and thrills. So it is the task of Orpheus—of the god of the musicians and the poets, not of the prophets and the preachers—to woo mankind out of his foolishness.