ON CHOOSING A WORLD VIEW

Speech to graduating class of Pickering College School, Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, June 2007.

I am speaking particularly to those of you about to leave school, around age 18.  For most people this is a point at which they make basic choices about how they see the world - their world view.  This then becomes the frame through which they perceive and think about the world for the rest of their lives, unless they meet some profound crisis that proves it useless.

How can anyone do this at age 18, when you have only you’re your own brief personal experience, plus whatever others, mostly your teachers, have taught you?  Most of this may be true, but since progress depends on revision of knowledge as well as its expansion, you know that at least some of this received knowledge must be false.  From now on your knowledge of the world must expand more selectively and more critically.  To do that you must adopt some systematic world view of your own.

I was born in 1927.  Two years later the United States stock market crashed, pulling economies in every other country down with it, thrusting millions of people into unemployment and hunger, and casting all conventional thought into confusion and doubt.  Conventional world views had failed.  18-year-olds everywhere were compelled to find new ones.  Of course, for as long as possible, those still able to live comfortably carried on as before, but by June 1940, when I was evacuated to Canada and eventually came to Pickering, conventional world views had lost all authority. 

Hitler’s armies had unleashed on the complacent middle classes of Western Europe the same sort of physical and intellectual violence which the industrialized West had applied in the 19^th Century to every country without the industry necessary for their own defence – the British and other European empires.  West Europeans who had enjoyed a monopoly of might and right, who had with impunity seized land and wealth wherever they could, suddenly themselves became victims of the same brutal process, the same logic of racial hierearchy.

Fortunately for me, my parents were dissidents.  They never believed that people with less power, less money, or a darker skin, needed less to eat, less education, less security or less dignity than those who had more than enough of all these things, and therefore accepted the world as they found it.  My father had not only thought dissident thoughts, but done dissident deeds: first as a family doctor employed by Welsh coal miners in dispute with the British Medical Association (a dispute similar to your own in Saskatchewan in the 1950s), then as a surgeon with the 15^th International Brigade, defending the Spanish Republic against its own generals.

At that time, the special branch of British police were less interested in Hitler’s sympathizers than in his opponents.  So my parent’s names were on their lists.  By June 1940 Hitler had conquered all of Western Europe from Norway to the Pyrenees, had political control of Eastern Europe up to the borders of Greece and Russia, and naval support through the entire European Atlantic coast.  The American ambassador in London thought the war was more or less over, and so did many others at the top of English society.  My mother had worked for a Dutch pharmaceutical company.  She left Rotterdam on the last ship to England before German bombers destroyed the entire inner city.  Any time soon, German troops seemed likely to march down Whitehall, as they had just marched down the Champs Elysees.  As in France, a compliant, defeated government might then hand its police files to the Gestapo, and my family would be on the first train to the camps.

So despite the risks of crossing an Atlantic crammed with German submarines, it seemed safer to send me, and a lot of other kids, to the generous hospitality of North America.  Luckily for me, I went on the Duchess of Bedford.  Had I sailed on a later ship, the City of Benares, I would probably have drowned along with 77 other children, when it was torpedoed in the icy North Atlantic.

Faced with the collapse of all conventional assumptions, the whole liberal, industrially developed world had to find new ways of thinking.  People with wealth and power had to think of new ways to retain their privileges, and people without wealth or power had to find new ways to resume their advance toward a sharing, co-operative society.  In 1945, when I came back to England, a new balance between these contending visions was reached through postwar welfare states.  In UK this included our National Health Service, in which I served throughout my working life.

As all of you have already been taught, effective theories must be based upon evidence.  The validity of a theory can be measured in two ways:  first, how far it explains evidence we already have; and second, how far it poses the right questions from which to find new evidence.  Two tests, and two measures: explanatory power, and predictive power: if so and so, then such and such.

These same tests can be applied to entire philosophies, or world views: how far do they explain evidence we already have, and how far do they reveal new ways to add new evidence?  This new evidence is not only acquired by formal experiment.  Most of it comes from people simply living and working within whatever world view they have adopted, learning as they go along both their opportunities and their limitations.

At Pickering in 1943, when I was 15 years old, I chose a world view which passed those two tests with spectacular success.  It provided a consistent framework of explanation for evidence we already had, and an effective framework for developing new questions with new answers, through new testable hypotheses.  Armed with two volumes of selected works by Marx and Engels, I adopted them as my tutors, alongside the wonderful teachers Pickering then provided – most of all, Joe McCulley and Barney Jackson, who were genuinely devoted to freedom of thought, and willing to help students to develop new ideas rather than memorise old ones.  If you want to see where that led me, you can read it here in this book: Political Economy of Health Care: a clinical perspective.  This will be in the College Library.  It may not be your easiest read, but you don’t have to be a doctor or a medical student to understand it.  All of you will some day be patients, and will therefore be drawn into the work of healthcare.  And all of you have been born into a world overdue for fundamental change, in new ways which only your generation can discover.  I believe this book could help many of you to do that.

My book sums up the consequences of my own choices.  Yours won’t and can’t be the same, but I hope you will not just accept one of the many world views on offer with no basis in evidence, designed only for consumption rather than use in active citizenship.  Having adopted your world view, I hope you will test it through useful work in the real world.  Modifying or rejecting it according to your experience, I hope you will end with a conclusion useful for your successors.  Lead a useful, experimental life.  Without that, we shall never learn how to live.