Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘It was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth, we were the forerunners of a new dispensation, we were not afraid of anything.’ Moore’s writings, he thought, freed him from conformity and accepted bounds. They made it permissible for him to choose his personal myth: the person he thought he was, the individual he wanted others to recognize, the man who took decisions and battled with circumstances and aimed at perfection as a way of putting a barrier around him. Or to put it differently, in words taken from Iris Murdoch, man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture: it is just a case of making the right picture; and Keynes’s adult picture of himself was made by the Apostles.47

      ‘We repudiated entirely a personal liability on us to obey general rules,’ Keynes said of the Apostolic early readers of Principia Ethica. ‘We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, in the strictest sense of the term, immoralists.’ Moore’s Apostolic followers, said Keynes, ‘were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good’. Most Apostles believed in the rationality of human nature: ‘we were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence … for everything and everyone.’48

      The objective world was discounted beneath the primacy of personal feelings by the Apostolic readers of Principia Ethica. ‘Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s, of course, but chiefly our own,’ as Keynes believed.

      These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion … The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first. But in the early days under Moore’s influence the public treatment of this and its associated acts was, on the whole, austere and platonic.49

      It is a measure of the daring of these ideas that Sir Roy Harrod in his official biography of Keynes published in 1951 omitted the phrase that ‘love came a long way first’ among his ‘prime objects in life’ – despite the remark being indispensable to understanding the trajectory of Keynes’s career. Not everyone will be beguiled by Principia Ethica, as the Apostles were, into enthroning personal relationships and the contemplation of beauty as the principal ends of human life. But for Keynes these remained the purpose of civilized existence.

      Keynes might have been a stony, sterile, mortifying intellectual, more an oblivious calculating-machine than a man, but for the loving attention and ease of his upbringing by two bright parents. His zest was all his own, from infancy onwards, but they nurtured his originality, his creativity and his love of imaginative play. Although Keynes read deeply from boyhood, the great influences on him were personal rather than bookish. He responded to some people with staunch loyalty, and incorporated the best of their ideas into his own. His upbringing and early manhood exemplify the suppleness of the English class system from the 1870s: Eton and King’s set the ambit of his life; he learnt at school and college to discriminate between the shoddy, the stupid and the futile in ideas, amusements, objects and people and all that was well made, intelligent and purposive.

      Clear thinking about other people’s mazes of notions and impulses contributed less to Keynes’s prodigious authority than the fact that all his conscious thoughts and deliberate acts were intended to serve what he believed to be true. No one, he thought, was entitled to accept a dogma unless he had thought or tested it himself. Few people had the disposition, the education, the strength of mind, the tenacity to think as he did: that is, to sift the weight of authority and tradition; to jettison much, but treasure a little. The urge to self-deception, which seemed to Keynes fundamental to untrained and thoughtless people, was what he most resisted. Public opinion he recognized as gullible, uninformed, wayward and super-abundant in misplaced confidence. Improvisations, expedients and thoughtless half-truths led to blunders, as he was to demonstrate in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

      Keynes thought the Apostles stood apart from other Edwardians: ‘We prefer to analyse and discuss ends; we have not very much to say about means and duties.’ But they were akin to many of their contemporaries in feeling that traditional verities were flickering out. ‘In all the fields of knowledge and action, boundaries are being broken down with a rapidity to which there is no kind of parallel whatever in the past history of the world,’ he said in his paper on ‘Modern Civilisation’ delivered in 1905. ‘I cannot believe that family relations, or business relations, or political relations will subsist much longer with any sincerity or useful purpose, unless we remember that all duties are with respect to time and place, and that sometimes old duties must go to be replaced by new.’ Three years later, delivering his paper entitled ‘Paradise’, he reverted to this theme. ‘Our old ideas are not so much overthrown as upset. The old is not destroyed; it is replaced. We simply learn to see new things in a different light.’ His life as an economist, official, public man and benefactor of the arts held true to these beliefs. But he was an Edwardian, not a Victorian, so never caught unawares speaking in earnest. In submitting his credo in 1908, he chose to tease. His mother’s enfranchisement, the destruction of bulwarks of boneheaded reaction, sexual liberty, affordable pleasures for poorer people, disseminated culture were all causes that he supported until his death – but without the solemnity that characterized so much twentieth-century progressive thinking in Cambridge. ‘I believe’, he affirmed on the Apostles’ hearth-rug, ‘in Woman’s Suffrage and the New Mathematical Tripos, in the abolition of the House of Lords and the Sodomy Acts, in cheap weekend tickets, in Heaven and Hell and The Times Book Club.’ And so he did.50

      The universities of Oxford and Cambridge trained young men to serve the needs of an expansive imperial nation. They broadened admissions policy to include youths such as Neville Keynes – the provincial, non-Anglican son of a self-made businessman – whom they converted to their values by imposing Greek as a compulsory entrance requirement, and by providing a non-vocational curriculum based on classics. Both the entrance requirements and the curriculum were aimed at ensuring that neither university would be soiled by mercenary values. Thrusting businessmen would not pay for their sons to fritter away three years without promise of monetary profit. Still less would young men find that their undergraduate training disposed them towards life in business offices. Until the 1880s the academic cream of the undergraduates had become clergymen. Afterwards they entered government departments or the colonial service, enlisted as military officers, practised law or perhaps medicine. ‘It is really most distressing the way the civil service swallows nearly all the best Cambridge men,’ G. M. Trevelyan told Keynes around 1906.1

      The Liberal legislation of 1870–1, СКАЧАТЬ