My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyapposite to say on this subject. The answer to the question whether it is better to beyoung or old for the practical tasks of life depends mostly on your answer to thefurther question —what do you want to do? You are becoming too old to be a pingpongchampion at twenty, but in the view of Shaw you are much too young at eightyto be a statesman. Somerset Maugham added: politician at forty, statesman at eighty.As usual, Shaw's paradox contained and protected his underlying truth; the humantragedy is that we all die just as we are getting a little sense. His answer was to livelonger and work later. But how? The answer still eludes us; yet we need not run awayfrom life by retiring at the height of the powers which even our present life spanaffords.It is clear that in certain specialised spheres of the mind, youth is as important as it isin sport. I have heard an eminent physicist say that you cannot easily use the languageof modern electronics if you are over thirty, and for physics itself and the highermathematics the supple qualities and mental flexibility of youth appear to be aconsiderable aid to invention. Yet the modern statesman who—in my own phrase—'should live and work with scientists as the Medici lived and worked with artists',requires altogether different qualities. His business is not to delve into the intricaciesof the process, but to judge its effective results and to co-ordinate them with theresults of other processes in a creative synthesis. This requires in supreme degree thequalities of balance, harmony, judgment, acquired authority by long proof ofcommanding capacity; attributes which are more usually associated with full maturity.If we can see the organisation of the scientific state in the future as a pyramid in form,the lower layers of the edifice will be occupied by the most highly specialiseddepartments and the apex by the most generally experienced intelligences which coordinatethe whole. Between the base of extreme specialisation and the apex ofgeneral direction will be many layers, or storeys, of increasing co-ordination. At eachstage will be minds which can co-ordinate the work of the separate, specialiseddepartments immediately beneath, and their intelligence will become more general,more dependent on judgment rather than narrow, specialised knowledge, as thestructure of organisation approaches the summit. This method of organisation, which Ifirst suggested long ago in The Alternative (1947) may well be remote from the finalform, but a world in which we overcome such absurdities as, for example, thecomplete division then prevailing between psychological and endocrine research,must surely evolve some such method of administration. When we contemplate thesepossibilities it is not difficult to conceive different but beneficial uses for the diversequalities of youth and age at all levels.In the present world this question of youth or age depends largely on whetheropportunity comes early or late. A few kings of genius, like Frederick the Great or thetwo outstanding Swedes, had their opportunities early. Either heredity or revolutionmay give the early chance. Bonaparte had opportunity early, in a revolutionarysituation which affords such men at all ages their opening. Yet it is not clear even thenwhether early opportunity is in fact an advantage. Napoleon at Waterloo appears inmodern research to have been a burnt-out old man, although he was almost exactlythe same age as politicians now recommended by the parties to head government andopposition as conspicuous examples of young statesmanship. It is comical to regardBonaparte at Rivoli in his twenty-seventh year, and all the bright boys who weresubsequently his marshals, and then to hear the present generation of heavily middle-109 of 424