Exploration  

Doing What Comes "Naturally"

by Stephen Cox

Is liberty an acquired taste?

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The political history of the late 20th century (in the West, at any rate) can be mapped as a battleground between two forms of liberalism, "classical" and "modern." "Classical liberalism" (now usually called libertarianism) upheld the idea of individual rights, protected by strict limitations on government. "Modern liberalism," the more popular form, offered a hope of individual empowerment, guided and assisted by large extensions of government influence.

The two labels lose much of their meaning when taken outside the immediate political context, yet each form of liberalism is ordinarily associated with its own set of cultural attitudes, attitudes so congenial to its nature as to merit the name of either "classical liberal" or "modern liberal." And, just as every political idea presses toward some ideal formulation, some utopian display of itself, so does every cultural attitude. The ideal version may be found in a film, a poem, a cultural movement — anything that shows the nature of the attitude in definite and unmistakable form.

If you want a pure and pungent taste of the liberal cultures of the 20th century, you would do well to read a pair of books that can be found in any used bookstore, "Lost Horizon" (1933), by the British novelist James Hilton, and "Summerhill" (1960), by the British educationist A.S. Neill. Each is a work of utopian literature, motivated by its own variety of liberal assumptions; and each was once very popular. (Both books, indeed, remain in print.) The sequence of the two works, with "Summerhill," the modern liberal volume, coming in second, and the difference between their dates of publication (three decades, the interval between one generation and another), aptly symbolizes the gradual process by which modern liberalism became the final ideology of the century. Yet both works maintain their relevance today, as ideal expressions of the strengths and weaknesses of the two great cultural attitudes.

Jorge Luis Borges once spoke of literary works that seem obligatory, works that one can hardly imagine not being in the world. It is difficult to imagine a world in which modern liberal assumptions were not carried to the "Summerhill" extreme. It is equally hard to imagine a world in which classical liberal ideals and anxieties did not result in something like "Lost Horizon."

"Summerhill" is the story of a "progressive" school, written by the school's leader and founder. Alexander Sutherland Neill (1883–1973) started the institution that would eventually be known as Summerhill in 1921, but the place became famous only after his book was published. It was a huge best seller. The copy I own represents the tenth printing in just four years. It carries fulsome encomia by Ashley Montagu, the social biologist, and Henry Miller, the novelist; and it contains a long foreword by Erich Fromm, the man who probably did more than anyone else to popularize "advanced" ideas of psychology, and the cultural attitudes derived from them, in post-World War II America. When I was in college in the 1960s, a psych-major friend of mine expressed the general attitude of the hip people I knew. "I wouldn't want to be a teacher," he said, "unless I could teach in a Summerhill school." He did become a teacher, but it wasn't in a Summerhill school. He now laughs at his early enthusiasm. For a season, however, Neill's ideas exerted an irresistible effect on many people. And although Summerhill itself is pretty much out of circulation, its cultural assumptions are not.

Located in an English provincial town, Summerhill was a school for 40 or 50 pre-teens and teenagers whom Neill, its anti-"master," preferred not to call his "students." This reluctance made sense, because Summerhill was less a place to study than a place in which to enact a philosophy of life. Summerhill residents were not required to attend classes or, actually, to do much of anything. If they wanted to study, they could, and some apparently did, but the hallmark of the place was the total absence of ordinary rules. Summerhill was the image of a world made free from all restrictions, at least of the more obvious and traditional kinds.

Neill has often been termed a "libertarian," a title seemingly merited by Summerhill's simple "test" of practical morality: "Is what Mr. X is doing really harmful to anyone else? If the answer is no, then objectors to Mr. X are acting anti-life." At Summerhill, as we will see, other ideas managed to trump that one, but it's a pretty libertarian idea nonetheless.

And Neill had other ideas that bespeak a broadly liberal culture. He was certain, for instance, that young people should not be bullied or coerced by their teachers, and especially that they should not be bullied into training themselves for "respectable" careers that they did not really want. President Clinton's notion that every American should attend college would have seemed ridiculous, even monstrous, to Mr. Neill. In addition, Neill was an apostle of sexual freedom and frankness. A great deal of Summerhill is concerned with the evil of warning children against masturbation and otherwise teaching them that sex is to be feared and avoided.

This is the side of modern liberal culture that is most attractive to classical liberals, many of whom have exactly the same ideas. Liberalism always stands for some kind of liberty, and modern liberals have taken a distinguished part in campaigns for what they often call "personal freedom" (as if there were an impersonal kind).

Of course, it's hard to talk about sex for very long without becoming a crackpot, and Neill became a very pronounced form of crackpot. Believing, like most other people of his generation, that homosexuality was a bad thing, instigated by bad childhood experiences, and believing also that a Summerhill education was good for almost anything that ailed you, he easily concluded that "over a period of thirty-eight years, the school has not turned out a single homosexual." I'll bet. Nevertheless, he does not recommend that homosexuality be punished in any way. His idea is that people are good and that when they are placed in good and happy environments, goodness and happiness must result:

No happy man ever disturbed a meeting, or preached a war, or lynched a Negro. . . . No happy man ever committed a murder or a theft. No happy employer ever frightened his employees.

All crimes, all hatreds, all wars can be reduced to unhappiness.

I will have more to say about Neill's idea of "happiness." Just now, I want to note that he is never very strong in the fact department. A lot of the things he says are merely things that make him happy to say. Most readers, encountering declarations like the one just quoted, will immediately be inclined to ask: Didn't Adolf Eichmann say that he would leap into his grave happy because he had liquidated millions of Jews? And haven't you ever worked for anybody who enjoyed making everybody else miserable? To such obvious questions, Neill has nothing to say. After reading a few pages of his book, one begins to see why Summerhill was called "The Island."

Neill's innocent trust in happiness and goodness is a clue that he is not playing a classical liberal hand. From the beginning, classical liberalism emphasized the importance of distrusting "good" people and their spontaneous urges. Isabel Paterson spoke for most classical liberals when she said that nothing that good people might ever do could possibly surprise her. There are many more good people than evil people in the world, and the good people have a much better chance of imposing their will on others. That is one reason why government must be limited — to make sure that no one, including good people like you and me, ever gets enough power to dominate other people's lives. Inseparable from classical liberal culture is a skepticism, even a cynicism, about freeing all the "goodness" inherent in "the people."

These ideas, though simple, never occurred to A.S. Neill; although it must be admitted that in "Summerhill" he professes little interest in any problems of government, except those that elicit his peculiar notions about the causes of war and crime. (He does think that government should do things like "abolishing the slums," but he doesn't go into detail about that.) "Summerhill," however, is a prefect model of the modern liberal state, where every resource necessary for "happiness" is provided by a benevolent higher power, in this case A.S. Neill and his staff. The reason why young people at Summerhill are "free" to steal, swear, masturbate, and cut their classes for decades at a time is that, whatever happens, the masters of Summerhill are ready to minister to all their needs.

In this sense, freedom at Summerhill is something bestowed: "[t]he bestowal of freedom is the bestowal of love." And the limits of freedom (for there are limits, after all) are decided, not just by the Neill administration, which is always lurking in the background, arranging meetings, cooking dinners, and cadging money from parents, but by a general assembly of staff and students, each gifted with an equal vote. There is no separation of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in the "democracy" of Summerhill. The assembly meets every Saturday to make up rules, try the people who violate them, and execute condign punishment. Freedom at Summerhill is the freedom to do what one's neighbors decide to let one get away with. Democracy is freedom, freedom is happiness, and happiness is goodness. What democracy does has to be good.

Very simple. But where have we heard something like this before? The unacknowledged source is the great prophet of modern liberalism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yet, lest you imagine that Summerhill, like certain other institutional progeny of Rousseau's political ideas, is always on the brink of a reign of terror, it is important to stipulate that the power of the General School Meeting is mitigated and rendered palatable by its lenient and relativistic idea of personal responsibility. To put this as briefly as possible, personal responsibility really does not exist at Summerhill; all responsibility is "social." When someone uses his "freedom" to go wrong, "society" pays the price — "society," of course, being the innocent bystanders. All will be well if they understand that they have a duty (to their own happiness, of course) to endure the unruly adventures of the freest spirits among them. In fact, they have a duty not just to endure the aggressive but also to reclaim them, by means of counseling, laws, judicial processes, and big rewards (manifestations of "love") for misbehavior.

Neill tells the story of a boy who stole bicycle pedals from another boy in order to fix his own bicycle and take a trip on it. The case was brought to the General Meeting, where the offending student (or, to Neill's way of thinking, the non-offending non-student) was condemned to return the pedals and give up the trip. When the boy's fellow citizens were told, however, that he stole the pedals because he was out of cash (good reason!), "Jim's" sentence was rescinded. But that's not the end. There was still the nagging question of "what to do about Jim" himself: "Finally it is decided to open a subscription fund to put Jim's bike in order. His schoolmates chip in to buy him pedals for his bike, and he sets off happily on his trip."

The reward for theft is the blessing of the community. Neill assures us that when people appeal a sentence, they "usually" get a lighter one, because "the children realize that if the defendant feels he has been unfairly judged, there is a good chance that he actually has been." This realization, of course, has nothing to do with any rational reflection on specific facts, only with a desire to believe that everyone at Summerhill is good and free and happy, or just about to become that way, when shown enough love. "Reason" is one of the rarest words in Neill's vocabulary, but we do hear a great deal about the supremacy of "the heart" over "the head," and "the power to subordinate thinking to feeling."

There is, however, an implicit and strongly insistent rationale for the whole Summerhill establishment. I refer to the fact that the parents of Summerhill children, as Neill describes them, are modern liberals or radicals who are wealthy enough to pay annual fees of 250 pounds — $7000 in today's money — to ensure the survival of his experiment in democracy. (Summerhill's five staff members were paid only about $10,000 a year in today's money, plus room and board, which says something about the possibility of economic "exploitation," even in utopia.) Modern liberal experiments have usually been inspired and supported, if not always funded, by the people who have least to lose from them. One can easily imagine what would result if Summerhillian ideas — the priority of emotion to intellect, of play to work, of unearned approval to merited respect — were exported to less favorable environments. One can imagine the result because one can see it plainly manifested in public schools throughout America's inner cities, schools in which discipline has collapsed, academic subjects have become diluted almost to the vanishing point, and sports, sex, and the cultivation of "positive" though unearned "self-images" dominate the cultural landscape.

Neill would deny that such tawdry counterfeits of education have anything to do with his ideas, because none of them represents a full and pure expression of what he had in mind. True, but unconvincing. The same could be said, and usually is said, by everyone who advocates a failed social program. "The experiment," it is said, "hasn't really yet been tried." Yes, something is always interfering. But why didn't you take account of that to begin with?

Modern liberals, who have spent the last 40 years applying affirmative action, busing, bilingual teaching, and antiracist, antisexist propaganda to the problems of American education, often claim that all the important problems would have been solved by now if it weren't for the reactionary attitudes, the "ingrained racism," etc., of the surrounding society, or simply for its "chronic underfunding of social programs." The implication, which is seldom allowed to remain unspoken, is that society as a whole must be remodeled, that social engineers must be given more sweeping powers, before the good in everyone comes spontaneously to light.

There is a good deal of this elitist cultural assumption in Neill's book, where the (rare!) failures of his system are routinely blamed on outside influences — bad parents, rotten customs, an entire culture that Neill would change, if only he had the power to transform everyone into a "social being." Thus failure becomes an implicit argument for bigger experiments, larger investments, a wider sphere of influence for Neill himself. If only everyone in the world would give up religion, cease trying to make a profit, surrender silly ideas about sex, stop treating kids like inferiors, start acting like the best of Summerhill parents: "Our successes are always those whose homes were good." It's an interesting move in the intellectual game, this assertion that educational success depends on the swamps around the Island, rather than the Island itself. It's also a bluff: if the outside environment is that important, who needs Summerhill? But it's not clear that the player sees that he's bluffing.

Equally interesting is Neill's argument that his ideas must be good because some people manage to prosper in spite of them. "Take," he says, "the case of Mervyn." Mervyn "attended Summerhill for ten years" and was never forced to "attend a single class." So he didn't. Therefore, "at age seventeen, he hardly knew how to read." This astonishing revelation will appear less astonishing when one considers that it could be made about millions of American graduates of government schools, young people who have never attended a meaningful class and who, therefore, are functionally illiterate. But as Neill demonstrates, there is no cause for alarm. "When Mervyn left school and decided to become an instrument maker, he quickly taught himself how to read and absorbed in a short time through self-study all the technical knowledge he needed. Through his own efforts, he made himself ready for his apprenticeship. Today, this same chap is thoroughly literate, commands a good salary, and is a leader in his community." The child whom Neill wanted to save has obviously saved himself.

Victims of elitist attempts at acculturation in contemporary America often save themselves, too. But it never dawns on Neill, just as it never dawns on any other educational bureaucrat, that the Mervyns of this world have no need to languish for decades in pedagogic utopias where nothing is being either taught or learned. It would have been better for Mervyn if he had dropped out of school at the age of seven. Unfortunately, he was not permitted to do so.

Like "Summerhill," our other book, "Lost Horizon," is a work of utopian imaginative literature; but it is conscious of the fact that it is. It is clearly labeled a work of fiction. Like the seminal book in the genre, Thomas More's "Utopia," it is one of those rare works of serious fiction that have given a word, an image, and a concept to popular speech. Everyone knows what is meant by "utopia," and everyone knows what is meant by "Shangri-La," the fictional location of "Lost Horizon": it is a paradise, hidden behind inaccessible mountains, where people live far beyond the normal range of human years and far beyond the normal scope of human happiness.

One of the great scenes in 20th-century literature is the episode in "Lost Horizon" in which Hugh Conway, a member of the British foreign service who has found his way to Shangri-La, hears its history recited by the leader of the community, the High Lama. The elderly gentleman narrates the adventures of Father Perrault, a French missionary, who in 1719 discovered the ruins of a Tibetan religious establishment on a high shelf of rock about the Valley of the Blue Moon, deep in the Himalayas. He decided to restore the monastery and dedicate it to the service of his order. The High Lama describes the mutual respect between Perrault and the local Buddhist population, the way in which his philosophy of life grew broader and more tolerant and their philosophy grew more cosmopolitan and sophisticated, the way in which he drew like-minded refugees from the outer world into a brotherhood of scholars, philosophers, and artists dwelling peaceably at Shangri-La. He tells Perrault's story through the 17th century, the 18th century, the 19th century . . . until Conway, grasping the truth, exclaims, "You are still alive, Father Perrault."

He is indeed alive, preserved as if in living amber by the peculiar atmosphere, physical and cultural, of Shangri-La. The remainder of the book narrates the conflict within Conway's mind, and the minds of his three fellow travelers, about whether to remain in Shangri-La or try to escape from it. Hilton is not a great artist; his plot is weak and at some points intellectually ambiguous, and his characterizations are mostly stereotypical. His prose isn't entirely up to his great conception. Yet the conception itself is unforgettable. I mean, of course, the conception of an ideally private life, extended and enriched by its studied isolation from "this world." Even Ayn Rand, the libertarian "realist," evidently could not avoid being inspired by the fantasy of Shangri-La. Her model for the utopia of "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) is more than anything else the utopia of "Lost Horizon."^*

The model was well chosen, because the central theme of "Lost Horizon" is not the extension of life but, as in Rand's novel, the preservation of individual liberty and the conditions that make it possible. "Lost Horizon," like "Summerhill," does not pretend to be a political book, but its political preoccupations are clear. The work is dated "April, 1933," soon after Hitler's coming to power, and it offers countless allusions to the political crises of the 20th century. It begins with disenchanted remarks about the British empire, which Conway serves with a considerable degree of skepticism. The Great War set him adrift from his cultural moorings: "The chief thing I've asked from the world since then is to leave me alone." He is fleeing from another outbreak of political violence — a revolution in "Baskul," where he served as His Majesty's Consul — when he fetches up in Shangri-La, a place that seems to preserve the peace and privacy that are necessary for the cultivation of individual life.

That is also the High Lama's view of the situation. He dreams of maintaining Shangri-La as the last refuge of real civilization — delicate, complex, accessible only to individuals in their most private moments. Reviewing the trend of political and military events from the 17th century to the present, he "foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless — all would be lost like the lost books of Livy, or wrecked as the English wrecked the Summer Palace in Pekin."

Notice Hilton's choice of words: "the small, the delicate, the defenseless." That puts "civilization" on the proper scale, the scale of individuals appreciating the kind of things that only individuals notice and care for. The thought recurs when Father Perrault speaks about Conway's own future at Shangri-La: "You will conserve the fragrance of our history and add to it the touch of your own mind. You will welcome the stranger, and teach him the rule of age and wisdom; and one of these strangers, it may be, will succeed you when you are yourself very old." What opposes tyranny and barbarity is the understanding and enjoyment of history and culture. Culture can be appreciated, augmented, and passed on to the future only by individuals. Only an individual can smell a "fragrance"; only a truly free individual will be at leisure to enjoy the "fragrance of history."

Like liberals of all varieties — like Neill, for instance — Hilton wants all people to be free and happy. Happiness is so much the point in Shangri-La that even the grave High Lama makes much of his pleasurable experiences with drugs, and communicates to Conway the pleasant intelligence that girls in the Valley of the Blue Moon are only moderately chaste. Like Conway, however, we may be curious to discover what "the ultimate basis of law and order" may be in Shangri-La, a place where the rulers are self-absorbed philosophers, backed by "neither soldiers nor police."

The rule of the lamasery is about 99% noninterference. A spokesman for the "ruling" elite restates a classical liberal principle: "We believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much." Under this system of government, the people enjoy prosperity; and prosperity, Hilton says, is conducive to order. Also, "crime was very rare . . . because only serious things were considered crimes" — a libertarian principle, par excellence.

Neill would endorse that principle, although I am not sure that he would endorse the High Lama's radically libertarian idea that people who want to leave his utopia are free to do so, but no help will be provided them, even if they die, as they probably will, in the howling wilderness that encompasses Shangri-La. This is not what Neill and other modern liberals mean by "freedom." The freedom that they most appreciate is the kind that lovingly "enables" people to do what they want and get what they want. But the regime at Shangri-La does not consider itself under any obligation to become a nanny state.

This brings up another aspect of the difference between Shangri-La and Summerhill. It has to do with the question of democracy. For Hilton, "freedom" means being free, as much as possible, from the interference of one's neighbors. It means privacy, and privacy means limitations on what people can do to other people. For Neill, however, "freedom" is inseparable from "democracy," and once you have "democracy," the sky's the limit. "Democracy" means the weekly Meeting, where people shout and scream, accuse and convict, make and unmake laws as if nobody ever made a law before, and in general ensure that everybody is always in everybody else's "social" face. There is no such "democracy" in Shangri-La, and the absence of democracy is not regretted. For the people of Shangri-La ("citizens" would never be the right word), the form that government takes is not important. What they want is a government that creates the conditions for privacy.

The trick is to keep such a society — in essence, a classical liberal society — in healthy operation. Hilton is well aware that in the modern world (probably in any world, including "utopias") the social order cannot be maintained indefinitely if people in general are not happy with it. That's a banal statement, but it's pertinent to the current discussion, because the idea of happiness is essential both to Hilton's work and to Neill's, although their concepts of happiness, and of the relationship of happiness to freedom, are as different as night and day.

For Hilton, both freedom and happiness are, to a large degree, cultivated tastes; for Neill, they represent the gratification of "natural" impulses. Here is a difference between liberalisms that does not quite conform to the classical liberal versus modern liberal distinction, but it is a difference that needs to be emphasized, even to radical libertarians, many of whom are more on Neill's side of this issue than on Hilton's.

There are three ways in which people can be induced to favor — to tolerate, to appreciate, to be happy with — a free society. They can be led to favor it by discovery, by learning, or by inheritance.

1. People can discover, on their own, that such a society makes them happy.
2. They can learn its virtues (A) from books, or (B) from the arguments of other people.
3. They can grow up in its culture and consciously or unconsciously conform themselves to it.

In long-established liberal societies, these three approaches are ordinarily combined with one another, and muddled together conceptually. But they can be analyzed separately, and our two authors help us to do so.

Neill vociferously recommends the first approach. That is his claim to fame — his insistence that happiness can easily be found when people are simply "left alone" to find it. By now, to be sure, we know that he is dealing from more than one deck of cards: Summerhill is a "free" institution whose inmates are committed to its custody by their parents, after which they are submitted to an all-encompassing program of social conditioning. One part of the program is the provision of limitless time to play, but another part is the sinister form of play that goes on in those amazing Weekly General Meetings: approach no. 2B.

And despite the hateful remarks that Neill enjoys making about the wage slaves who dwell outside the Island, about the whole "society" that "is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man — the scared-to-death conformist," he is unable to keep conformity (approach no. 3) completely out of his scheme:

I know that when Jean [a troublemaker] is fifteen, she will be a social girl. . . . I pin my faith on public opinion. No child will go on for years being disliked and criticized. . . .

Gradually his natural love of approval forced him [another troublemaker] to seek the approval of the people in his new environment. . . .[H]e adapted himself to his new companions. In a few months he was a social being.

But suppose that someone's environment is not "social" in the way in which Neill, and other proponents of spontaneous development, prefer to define that word. Suppose that someone's ideal of happiness is just living from day to day with no thought in his head except the pleasure of annoying and imposing on other people? That's a good question. But let's go one step farther and ask, Who's to say that Neill's idea of happiness is the one that should prevail? What justifies his ideal? What arguments? What convincing evidence? As soon as we ask those questions, we are back to approach no. 2, the approach that assumes that ideas of liberty need to be learned, that the inclination to liberty needs to be intellectually cultivated.

Neill considers this issue no more attentively than other modern liberals consider the necessity of public education. Haven't schools always been run by the government? Well, no. They were made public with some difficulty. Persuasive arguments, bad or good, had to be found (approach no. 2). It is only because government schooling has now become traditional that its supporters can rely on people to continue believing that it can be made to work (approach no. 3). Neill's cultural ideas also rely heavily, though implicitly, on arguments made in the past, the conclusions of which have become traditional assumptions. I refer especially to arguments for Christianity. Neill detests religion (it's not "natural"), but he has no difficulty invoking the Christian idea of ethics and even the Christian idea of salvation: "You talk about salvation. We live salvation. . . . No, we do not consciously [!] follow Christianity, but from a broad point of view, Summerhill is about the only school in England that treats children in a way that Jesus would have approved of."

Despite his palpable reliance on the past — the heritage of Christianity, the culture instilled by "good homes" — Neill still visualizes happiness itself as easy, spontaneous, immediately attainable. His prevailing examples are the pleasures of sex, food, idle play, joyous disruption of other people's activities. He seldom recurs to the happiness of reasoning, reflecting, reading, or pursuing anything requiring intellectual effort or spiritual refinement. "Books have little value for me," he happily confesses. "Only pedants claim that learning from books is education."

With a candor virtually unexampled among other pedagogues, he confides that "learning" fails to arouse his passions: "Learning is important, but not to everyone. Nijinsky could not pass his school exams. . . . All that any child needs is the three R's; the rest should be tools and clay and sports and theater and paint and freedom." What this means in practice is suggested by the minutes of a General School Meeting:

"Harry [a teacher] complains that he spent an hour planing a panel for the front door, went to lunch, and came back to find that Billy [a pupil] had converted it into a shelf. I make accusations against the boys who borrowed my soldering outfit and didn't return it. My wife makes a fuss because three small children came after supper and said they were hungry and got bread and jam, and the pieces of bread were found lying in the hallway the next morning. Peter ['nother pupil] reports sadly that a gang threw his precious clay at each other in the pottery room. . . . There is always something happening, and there isn't a dull day in the whole year."

No? Offhand, I can't think of anything duller than meditating on the problem of the unused bread and jam, or on the little Gallipoli in the pottery shack — anything, that is, except people who put such controversies at the center of their lives. My suggestion is to punish the culprits and get on with the important things in life.

The GSM is clearly the reductio ad absurdum of something, but of what? I believe it is an attitude cherished by many people both in the classical liberal and in the modern liberal camp, the idea that, as Neill put it, people should be free to do what they want and no one should seriously object to the ideal of happiness that motivates them.

Well, of course someone should object, and someone had better object, if the results of education in freedom turn out to be the destruction of any kind of culture consistent with freedom itself. Libertarians who delight (as I do) in the vision of society as a "spontaneous order" should not assume that all spontaneous action is a good idea. Liberal societies were not created by the yelping barbarians who appear in Summerhill's version of "democracy." The framework for those societies — the only societies in history that have not been cruel and merciless, almost beyond belief — were laid by people who had learned (yes, had been taught) to take pleasure in historical knowledge, careful thought, skeptical evaluation of rival claims to belief, the studious separation of what is important from what is mere junk.

These people saw limited government as the best protection for individual freedom, but they knew that an appreciation for limited government was not something that children, or anyone else, can automatically arrive at. It wasn't until the 17th century that anyone did arrive at it. Further, they suspected that restraints of government are easiest to maintain in a culture that values self-restraint, a culture in which people discover more pleasurable pursuits than shouting, whining, politicking, and otherwise wasting their lives in hurtful play. The pursuits — the private joys — of civilization are almost all acquired pleasures.

That is the message of "Lost Horizon." Hilton emphasizes that his protagonist, Hugh Conway, can appreciate the civilized order of Shangri-La because he is a man of culture and learning who also found out what barbarism was, from his experience in World War I and the political events of the 1920s. He reflected on his knowledge and experience and acquired an intense appreciation of the pleasures of private life. The novel portrays the limited government of Shangri-La as dependent on its subjects' cultural attainments, particularly their education in self-restraint: "The chief factor in the government . .. . was the inculcation of good manners, which made men feel that certain things were 'not done,' and that they lost caste by doing them."

A utopia for snobs? Not really. Remember those Valley girls who are only moderately chaste. "Good-bye, Mr. Chips," the novel that Hilton wrote a few months after "Lost Horizon," shows that his own idea of culture was not impossibly challenging. Chips is a schoolteacher. His specialty is classics, one of the thousand forms of learning that schoolteacher Neill disdains. Chips' academic attainments, however, are only moderately good, and his expectations for his students are only moderately high. What distinguishes him is mainly "good manners" — decency, civility, a sensitivity to right and just ways of doing things. He realizes that this kind of culture is not innate. He is loath to punish his students, but he knows that he has to do so when they act out their infantile aggressions in the ways that Neill's regime encouraged his students to. Once regressions are repressed (worst of all words to Summerhill liberals), there is room for other things — not just the appreciation of Latin verse but also the appreciation of privacy and unregimented kindliness, and the mutual respect that ought to prevail in a liberal society.

I don't mean to suggest that "Good-bye, Mr. Chips" is an interesting work of literature. It's not. It has a slick sentimentality that does not appear in "Lost Horizon." It is, in fact, as sentimental as "Summerhill." A sentimental world is one in which good feelings always, in the end, prevail. Mr. Chips' version of liberal education always works, just as A.S. Neill's version always works (so long as the children's "homes" are good). That's not true of liberal culture in Shangri-La. I don't want to spoil the plot for you, in case you decide to read the book, but "Lost Horizon" is consistent about the idea that acquired tastes have to be, well, acquired, and not everyone acquires them. Or keeps them. Some well-educated, reputedly cultured people actually want to escape from Shangri-La, or even destroy it.

This is a most unusual observation for a utopia to make — the observation that even people living in an ideal society may not just naturally understand what makes it ideal. That was one of the considerations that led the founders of American classical liberalism (see James Madison in the tenth number of The Federalist) to insist on the idea of limited government, as opposed to unlimited "democracy." It's a consideration that should continue to commend itself, in a world in which the pleasures of coffee and wine, Raphael and T.S. Eliot, baseball statistics and books of economic theory, and even the kind of good manners that it doesn't take a wizard to divine, are recognized by all as cultivated tastes, while the pleasures of a free society are regarded by most as nothing more than doing what comes naturally.

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Like Shangri-La, Rand's utopia ("Galt's Gulch") is hidden behind a range of mountains, is founded by a great creative spirit who surrounds himself with friendly collaborators, and is strongly devoted to philosophy and the arts. Like Hilton's visionary community, it exists in opposition to the outside world while containing in "miniature" (one of Hilton's favorite words) the best features of that world's culture and technology. Though motivated by a central idea (like Shangri-La) it lacks (like Shangri-La) any system of central planning. I can think of no utopia that shares this set of features with "Atlas Shrugged" and "Lost Horizon." Anyone who reads the two books can discover more similarities, such as the clue to the utopia's existence that is provided by a character's knowledge of a famous artist's hitherto unknown composition, preserved in the secret utopia. (The composer is Chopin in "Lost Horizon," "Richard Halley" in "Atlas Shrugged").

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