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Chapter 11

The Frivolity of Evil Theodore Dalrymple

When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, meta- phorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off.

It would be just as absurd for me to say, on my imminent retirement after 14 years of my hospital and prison work, that I have paid my debt to society. I had the choice to do something more pleasing if I had wished, and I was paid, if not munificently, at least ade- quately. I chose the disagreeable neighborhood in which I practiced because, medically speaking, the poor are more interesting, at least to me, than the rich: their pathology is more florid, their need for attention greater. Their dilemmas, if cruder, seem to me more compelling, nearer to the fundamentals of human existence. No doubt I also felt my ser- vices would be more valuable there: in other words, that I had some kind of duty to per- form. Perhaps for that reason, like the prisoner on his release, I feel I have paid my debt to society. Certainly, the work has taken a toll on me, and it is time to do something else. Someone else can do battle with the metastasizing social pathology of Great Britain, while I lead a life aesthetically more pleasing to me.

My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best pre- vented and, when necessary, suppressed? Each time I listen to a patient recounting the cruelty to which he or she has been subjected, or has committed (and I have listened to several such patients every day for 14 years), these questions revolve endlessly in my mind.

No doubt my previous experiences fostered my preoccupation with this problem. My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and though she spoke very little of her life be- fore she came to Britain, the mere fact that there was much of which she did not speak gave evil a ghostly presence in our household.

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Later, I spent several years touring the world, often in places where atrocity had re- cently been, or still was being, committed. In Central America, I witnessed civil war fought between guerrilla groups intent on imposing totalitarian tyranny on their societies, opposed by armies that didn’t scruple to resort to massacre. In Equatorial Guinea, the current dicta- tor was the nephew and henchman of the last dictator, who had killed or driven into exile a third of the population, executing every last person who wore glasses or possessed a page of printed matter for being a disaffected or potentially disaffected intellectual. In Liberia, I visited a church in which more than 600 people had taken refuge and been slaughtered, possibly by the president himself (soon to be videotaped being tortured to death). The out- lines of the bodies were still visible on the dried blood on the floor, and the long mound of the mass grave began only a few yards from the entrance. In North Korea I saw the acme of tyranny, millions of people in terrorized, abject obeisance to a personality cult whose object, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, made the Sun King look like the personification of modesty.

Still, all these were political evils, which my own country had entirely escaped. I opti- mistically supposed that, in the absence of the worst political deformations, widespread evil was impossible. I soon discovered my error. Of course, nothing that I was to see in a British slum approached the scale or depth of what I had witnessed elsewhere. Beating a woman from motives of jealousy, locking her in a closet, breaking her arms deliberately, terrible though it may be, is not the same, by a long way, as mass murder. More than enough of the constitutional, traditional, institutional, and social restraints on large-scale political evil still existed in Britain to prevent anything like what I had witnessed elsewhere.

Yet the scale of a man’s evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical conse- quences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them. Some evil geniuses, of course, devote their lives to increasing that scope as widely as possible, but no such char- acter has yet arisen in Britain, and most evildoers merely make the most of their opportuni- ties. They do what they can get away with.

In any case, the extent of the evil that I found, though far more modest than the disas- ters of modern history, is nonetheless impressive. From the vantage point of one six- bedded hospital ward, I have met at least 5,000 perpetrators of the kind of violence I have just described and 5,000 victims of it: nearly 1 percent of the population of my city—or a higher percentage, if one considers the age-specificity of the behavior. And when you take the life histories of these people, as I have, you soon realize that their existence is as satu- rated with arbitrary violence as that of the inhabitants of many a dictatorship. Instead of one dictator, though, there are thousands, each the absolute ruler of his own little sphere, his power circumscribed by the proximity of another such as he.

Violent conflict, not confined to the home and hearth, spills out onto the streets. More- over, I discovered that British cities such as my own even had torture chambers: run not by the government, as in dictatorships, but by those representatives of slum enterprise, the drug dealers. Young men and women in debt to drug dealers are kidnapped, taken to the torture chambers, tied to beds, and beaten or whipped. Of compunction there is none— only a residual fear of the consequences of going too far.

Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil, the one that brings it close to the conception of original sin, is that it is unforced and spontaneous. No one requires people to commit it. In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil ordinary men and women do they do out of fear of not committing it. There, goodness requires heroism. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, for example, a man who failed to report a political joke to the authorities was himself guilty of an offense that could lead to deportation or death. But in modern Britain, no such conditions exist: the government does not require citizens to behave as I have described and punish them if they do not. The evil is freely chosen.

Not that the government is blameless in the matter—far from it. Intellectuals pro- pounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention and

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self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws that pro- moted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flour- ishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.

Of course, my personal experience is just that—personal experience. Admittedly, I have looked out at the social world of my city and my country from a peculiar and possibly unrepresentative vantage point, from a prison and from a hospital ward where practically all the patients have tried to kill themselves, or at least made suicidal gestures. But it is not small or slight personal experience, and each of my thousands, even scores of thousands, of cases has given me a window into the world in which that person lives.

And when my mother asks me whether I am not in danger of letting my personal ex- perience embitter me or cause me to look at the world through bile-colored spectacles, I ask her why she thinks that she, in common with all old people in Britain today, feels the need to be indoors by sundown or face the consequences, and why this should be the case in a country that within living memory was law-abiding and safe? Did she not herself tell me that, as a young woman during the blackouts in the Blitz, she felt perfectly safe, at least from the depredations of her fellow citizens, walking home in the pitch dark, and that it never occurred to her that she might be the victim of a crime, whereas nowadays she has only to put her nose out of her door at dusk for her to think of nothing else? Is it not true that her purse has been stolen twice in the last two years, in broad daylight, and is it not true that statistics—however manipulated by governments to put the best possible gloss upon them—bear out the accuracy of the conclusions that I have drawn from my personal experience? In 1921, the year of my mother’s birth, there was one crime recorded for every 370 inhabitants of England and Wales; 80 years later, it was one for every ten inhabitants. There has been a 12-fold increase since 1941 and an even greater increase in crimes of vio- lence. So while personal experience is hardly a complete guide to social reality, the histori- cal data certainly back up my impressions.

A single case can be illuminating, especially when it is statistically banal—in other words, not at all exceptional. Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me, claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and then called an ambulance.

There is something to be said here about the word “depression,” which has almost en- tirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.

A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient’s notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening.

My patient already had had three children by three different men, by no means un- usual among my patients, or indeed in the country as a whole. The father of her first child

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had been violent, and she had left him; the second died in an accident while driving a stolen car; the third, with whom she had been living, had demanded that she should leave his apartment because, a week after their child was born, he decided that he no longer wished to live with her. (The discovery of incompatibility a week after the birth of a child is now so common as to be statistically normal.) She had nowhere to go, no one to fall back on, and the hospital was a temporary sanctuary from her woes. She hoped that we would fix her up with some accommodation.

She could not return to her mother, because of conflict with her “stepfather,” or her mother’s latest boyfriend, who, in fact, was only nine years older than she and seven years younger than her mother. This compression of the generations is also now a common pat- tern and is seldom a recipe for happiness. (It goes without saying that her own father had disappeared at her birth, and she had never seen him since.) The latest boyfriend in this kind of ménage either wants the daughter around to abuse her sexually or else wants her out of the house as being a nuisance and an unnecessary expense. This boyfriend wanted her out of the house, and set about creating an atmosphere certain to make her leave as soon as possible.

The father of her first child had, of course, recognized her vulnerability. A girl of 16 living on her own is easy prey. He beat her from the first, being drunken, possessive, and jealous, as well as flagrantly unfaithful. She thought that a child would make him more responsible— sober him up and calm him down. It had the reverse effect. She left him.

The father of her second child was a career criminal, already imprisoned several times. A drug addict who took whatever drugs he could get, he died under the influence. She had known all about his past before she had his child.

The father of her third child was much older than she. It was he who suggested that they have a child—in fact he demanded it as a condition of staying with her. He had five children already by three different women, none of whom he supported in any way whatever.

The conditions for the perpetuation of evil were now complete. She was a young woman who would not want to remain alone, without a man, for very long; but with three children already, she would attract precisely the kind of man, like the father of her first child—of whom there are now many—looking for vulnerable, exploitable women. More than likely, at least one of them (for there would undoubtedly be a succession of them) would abuse her children sexually, physically, or both.

She was, of course, a victim of her mother’s behavior at a time when she had little control over her destiny. Her mother had thought that her own sexual liaison was more im- portant than the welfare of her child, a common way of thinking in today’s welfare Britain. That same day, for example, I was consulted by a young woman whose mother’s consort had raped her many times between the ages of eight and 15, with her mother’s full knowl- edge. Her mother had allowed this solely so that her relationship with her consort might continue. It could happen that my patient will one day do the same thing.

My patient was not just a victim of her mother, however: she had knowingly borne chil- dren of men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the conse- quences and the meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her—and say to hundreds of women patients in a similar situation—proved: next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I’ll tell you if you can go out with him.

This never fails to make the most wretched, the most “depressed” of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying “FUCK OFF” or “MAD DOG.” And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I

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would look for, so can they—and therefore they are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men.

Moreover, they are aware that I believe that it is both foolish and wicked to have chil- dren by men without having considered even for a second or a fraction of a second whether the men have any qualities that might make them good fathers. Mistakes are possible, of course: a man may turn out not to be as expected. But not even to consider the question is to act as irresponsibly as it is possible for a human being to act. It is knowingly to increase the sum of evil in the world, and sooner or later the summation of small evils leads to the triumph of evil itself.

My patient did not start out with the intention of abetting, much less of committing, evil. And yet her refusal to take seriously and act upon the signs that she saw and the knowledge that she had was not the consequence of blindness and ignorance. It was utterly willful. She knew from her own experience, and that of many people around her, that her choices, based on the pleasure or the desire of the moment, would lead to the misery and suffering not only of herself, but—especially—of her own children.

This truly is not so much the banality as the frivolity of evil: the elevation of passing pleasure for oneself over the long-term misery of others to whom one owes a duty. What better phrase than the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out of doors because her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house? And what better phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals who see in this conduct nothing but an extension of human freedom and choice, another thread in life’s rich tapestry?

The men in these situations also know perfectly well the meaning and consequences of what they are doing. The same day that I saw the patient I have just described, a man aged 25 came into our ward, in need of an operation to remove foil-wrapped packets of cocaine that he had swallowed in order to evade being caught by the police in possession of them. (Had a packet burst, he would have died immediately.) As it happened, he had just left his latest girlfriend—one week after she had given birth to their child. They weren’t get- ting along, he said; he needed his space. Of the child, he thought not for an instant.

I asked him whether he had any other children. “Four,” he replied. “How many mothers?” “Three.” “Do you see any of your children?” He shook his head. It is supposedly the duty of the doctor not to pass judgment on

how his patients have elected to live, but I think I may have raised my eyebrows slightly. At any rate, the patient caught a whiff of my disapproval.

“I know,” he said. “I know. Don’t tell me.” These words were a complete confession of guilt. I have had hundreds of conversa-

tions with men who have abandoned their children in this fashion, and they all know per- fectly well what the consequences are for the mother and, more important, for the children. They all know that they are condemning their children to lives of brutality, poverty, abuse, and hopelessness. They tell me so themselves. And yet they do it over and over again, to such an extent that I should guess that nearly a quarter of British children are now brought up this way.

The result is a rising tide of neglect, cruelty, sadism, and joyous malignity that stag- gers and appalls me. I am more horrified after 14 years than the day I started.

Where does this evil come from? There is obviously something flawed in the heart of man that he should wish to behave in this depraved fashion—the legacy of original sin, to speak metaphorically. But if, not so long ago, such conduct was much less widespread than it is now (in a time of much lesser prosperity, be it remembered by those who think that poverty explains everything), then something more is needed to explain it.

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A necessary, though not sufficient, condition is the welfare state, which makes it pos- sible, and sometimes advantageous, to behave like this. Just as the IMF is the bank of last resort, encouraging commercial banks to make unwise loans to countries that they know the IMF will bail out, so the state is the parent of last resort—or, more often than not, of first resort. The state, guided by the apparently generous and humane philosophy that no child, whatever its origins, should suffer deprivation, gives assistance to any child, or rather the mother of any child, once it has come into being. In matters of public housing, it is actually advantageous for a mother to put herself at a disadvantage, to be a single mother, without support from the fathers of the children and dependent on the state for income. She is then a priority; she won’t pay local taxes, rent, or utility bills.

As for the men, the state absolves them of all responsibility for their children. The state is now father to the child. The biological father is therefore free to use whatever income he has as pocket money, for entertainment and little treats. He is thereby reduced to the status of a child, though a spoiled child with the physical capabilities of a man: petulant, demand- ing, querulous, self-centered, and violent if he doesn’t get his own way. The violence esca- lates and becomes a habit. A spoiled brat becomes an evil tyrant.

But if the welfare state is a necessary condition for the spread of evil, it is not sufficient. After all, the British welfare state is neither the most extensive nor the most generous in the world, and yet our rates of social pathology—public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, hooliganism, criminality—are the highest in the world. Some- thing more was necessary to produce this result.

Here we enter the realm of culture and ideas. For it is necessary not only to believe that it is economically feasible to behave in the irresponsible and egotistical fashion that I have described, but also to believe that it is morally permissible to do so. And this idea has been peddled by the intellectual elite in Britain for many years, more assiduously than anywhere else, to the extent that it is now taken for granted. There has been a long march not only through the institutions but through the minds of the young. When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as “nonjudgmental.” For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.

There has been an unholy alliance between those on the Left, who believe that man is endowed with rights but no duties, and libertarians on the Right, who believe that consumer choice is the answer to all social questions, an idea eagerly adopted by the Left in precisely those areas where it does not apply. Thus people have a right to bring forth children any way they like, and the children, of course, have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything material. How men and women associate and have children is merely a mat- ter of consumer choice, of no more moral consequence than the choice between dark and milk chocolate, and the state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing, even if such non-discrimination has the same effect as British and French neutrality during the Spanish Civil War.

The consequences to the children and to society do not enter into the matter: for in any case it is the function of the state to ameliorate by redistributive taxation the material effects of individual irresponsibility, and to ameliorate the emotional, educational, and spiri- tual effects by an army of social workers, psychologists, educators, counselors, and the like, who have themselves come to form a powerful vested interest of dependence on the government.

So while my patients know in their hearts that what they are doing is wrong, and worse than wrong, they are encouraged nevertheless to do it by the strong belief that they have the right to do it, because everything is merely a matter of choice. Almost no one in Britain ever publicly challenges this belief. Nor has any politician the courage to demand a with- drawal of the public subsidy that allows the intensifying evil I have seen over the past 14 years—violence, rape, intimidation, cruelty, drug addiction, neglect—to flourish so exu- berantly. With 40 percent of children in Britain born out of wedlock, and the proportion still

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rising, and with divorce the norm rather than the exception, there soon will be no electoral constituency for reversal. It is already deemed to be electoral suicide to advocate it by those who, in their hearts, know that such a reversal is necessary.

I am not sure they are right. They lack courage. My only cause for optimism during the past 14 years has been the fact that my patients, with a few exceptions, can be brought to see the truth of what I say: that they are not depressed; they are unhappy—and they are unhappy because they have chosen to live in a way that they ought not to live, and in which it is impossible to be happy. Without exception, they say that they would not want their children to live as they have lived. But the social, economic, and ideological pressures— and, above all, the parental example—make it likely that their children’s choices will be as bad as theirs.

Ultimately, the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites is responsible for the continuing social disaster that has overtaken Britain, a disaster whose full social and economic consequences have yet to be seen. A sharp economic downturn would expose how far the policies of successive governments, all in the direction of libertinism, have at- omized British society, so that all social solidarity within families and communities, so pro- tective in times of hardship, has been destroyed. The elites cannot even acknowledge what has happened, however obvious it is, for to do so would be to admit their past responsibility for it, and that would make them feel bad. Better that millions should live in wretchedness and squalor than that they should feel bad about themselves—another aspect of the frivol- ity of evil. Moreover, if members of the elite acknowledged the social disaster brought about by their ideological libertinism, they might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behavior, for you cannot long demand of others what you balk at doing yourself.

There are pleasures, no doubt, to be had in crying in the wilderness, in being a man who thinks he has seen further and more keenly than others, but they grow fewer with time. The wilderness has lost its charms for me.

I’m leaving—I hope for good.

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How—and How Not—to Love Mankind Theodore Dalrymple

Almost every intellectual claims to have the welfare of humanity, and particularly the wel- fare of the poor, at heart: but since no mass murder takes place without its perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms.

Two great European writers of the nineteenth century, Ivan Turgenev and Karl Marx, illustrate this diversity with vivid clarity. Both were born in 1818 and died in 1883, and their lives paralleled each other almost preternaturally in many other respects as well. They nev- ertheless came to view human life and suffering in very different, indeed irreconcilable, ways—through different ends of the telescope, as it were. Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems.

The resemblances between the careers of these men begin with their attendance at Berlin University at overlapping times, where both were deeply affected—even intoxicated— by the prevailing Hegelianism. As a result, both considered careers as university teachers of philosophy, but neither ever held a university post. They had many acquaintances in common in Berlin, including Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian aristocrat who later became a revolutionary anarchist, the philosopher Bruno Bauer, and the radical poet Georg Herwegh. They shared a carelessness with money, perhaps because they were both born into easy circumstances and therefore assumed that money would never be a problem. Both started their writing careers as romantic poets, though more of Turgenev’s poetry than Marx’s was published.

Their literary influences and tastes were similar. Each read widely in the Greek and Latin classics; each could quote Shakespeare in the original. Both learned Spanish in order to read Calderón. (Turgenev, of course, also learned it to speak the native language of the great, but unsatisfactory, love of his life, the famous prima donna Pauline Viardot.) The two men were in Brussels at the outbreak of the 1848 revolution against the July monarchy in France, and both left to observe the events elsewhere. Turgenev’s closest Russian friend, Pavel Annenkov, to whom he dedicated some of his work, knew Marx well in Brussels—and left an unflattering description of him.

The secret police spied upon both men, and both lived most of their adult lives, and died, in exile. Each fathered a child by a servant: a youthful indiscretion in Turgenev’s case, a middle-aged one in Marx’s. Unlike Marx, however, Turgenev acknowledged his child and paid for her upbringing.

Both men were known for their sympathy with the downtrodden and oppressed. But for all their similarities of education and experience, the quality of each man’s compassion could not have been more different: for while one’s, rooted in the suffering of individuals, was real, the other’s, abstract and general, was not.

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To see the difference, contrast Turgenev’s 1852 story “Mumu” with Marx’s Communist Manifesto, written four years earlier. Both works, almost exactly equal in length, took shape in difficult circumstances: Marx, expelled from France for revolutionary activity, was resid- ing in Brussels, where he had no wish to be and no income, while Turgenev was under house arrest at Spasskoye, his isolated estate southwest of Moscow, for having written his Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, an implicitly anti-serfdom—and therefore subversive— book. The censor who allowed it to be published was dismissed and stripped of his pension.

“Mumu” is set in Moscow in the days of serfdom. Gerasim is a deaf and dumb serf of enormous stature and strength, whose owner, an old and tyrannical feudal landowner, has had him brought to the city from the countryside. Unable to express himself in words, Gera- sim clumsily woos a peasant girl called Tatyana, also owned by the landowner. On a whim, however, the landowner, a sour and embittered widow who is never named, decides to marry Tatyana off to another of her serfs, a drunken cobbler called Kapiton, thus dashing Gerasim’s hopes.

Not long after, Gerasim finds a young puppy drowning in a muddy creek. He rescues her and looks after her until she is a healthy, full-grown dog. He calls her Mumu, the nearest he can come to articulating a word, and everyone in the landowner’s Moscow establishment soon knows the dog by that name. Gerasim grows passionately fond of the dog, his only true friend, whom he allows to live with him in his little room, and who follows him every- where. The dog adores Gerasim.

One day the landowner sees Mumu through the window and asks for the dog to be brought to her. But Mumu is afraid of the landowner and bares her teeth to her. The land- owner instantly conceives a dislike of the dog and demands that she be gotten rid of. One of the landowner’s servants takes the dog away and sells it to a stranger. Gerasim searches for Mumu frantically but fails to find her. However, Mumu finds her way back to him, to his overwhelming joy.

Unfortunately, Mumu barks on the following night and wakes the landowner, who be- lieves herself to be sorely tried by this interruption of her sleep. She demands that the dog, this time, be destroyed. Her servants go to Gerasim and, by means of signs, pass on her demand. Gerasim, recognizing the inevitable, promises to destroy the dog himself.

There follow two passages of almost unbearable pathos. In the first, Gerasim takes Mumu to the local tavern: “In the tavern they knew Gerasim and understood his sign lan- guage. He ordered cabbage soup and meat and sat down with his arms on the table.

Mumu stood beside his chair, looking at him calmly with her intelligent eyes. Her coat literally shone: clearly she had only recently been combed. They brought Gerasim his cab- bage soup. He broke some bread into it, cut up the meat into small pieces and set the bowl down on the floor. Mumu started eating with her customary delicacy, her muzzle hardly touching the food. Gerasim studied her for a long time; two heavy tears rolled suddenly out of his eyes: one fell on the dog’s forehead, the other into the soup. He covered his face with his hand. Mumu ate half the bowl and walked away licking herself. Gerasim stood up, paid for the soup and left.”

He takes Mumu down to the river, picking up a couple of bricks en route. At the river- bank, he gets into a boat with Mumu and rows out some distance.

“Finally Gerasim sat up straight, hurriedly, with a look of sickly bitterness on his face, tied the bricks together with string, made a noose, placed it round Mumu’s neck, lifted her over the river, looked at her for the last time. . . . Trustingly and without fear she looked at him and slightly wagged her tail. He turned away, grimaced and let go. . . . Gerasim heard nothing, neither the whining of the falling Mumu, nor the heavy splash in the water; for him the noisiest day was still and soundless, as not even the quietest night can be soundless for us; and when he again opened his eyes the little waves were as ever hurrying along the

164 AN INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY

river’s surface, as if racing after each other, as ever they rippled against the sides of the boat, and only far behind one or two broad rings rippled towards the bank.”

We learn that after Mumu’s death Gerasim runs away back to his village, where he works like a slave in the fields: but never again does he form a close attachment to man or dog.

When the cultivated, aristocratic, revolutionary Russian exile Alexander Herzen read the story, he trembled with rage. Thomas Carlyle said it was the most emotionally affecting story he had ever read. John Galsworthy said of it that “no more stirring protest against tyrannical cruelty was ever penned.” And one of Turgenev’s relatives, to whom the author read “Mumu,” wrote afterward, “What a humane and good man one must be to understand and give expression to the experience and torments of another’s heart in that way!”

The story is autobiographical, and the tyrannical, captious, arbitrary, and selfish land- owner is the author’s mother, Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva. Widowed early, she was an ab- solute monarch on her estate. Many stories have come down to us of her cruelty, though not all have been authenticated: for example, that she had two serfs sent to Siberia for hav- ing failed to make their obeisances to her as she passed—because they did not see her. And the model for Gerasim was a deaf and dumb serf belonging to Varvara Petrovna called Andrei.

Clearly “Mumu” is an impassioned protest against the exercise of arbitrary power of one person over another, but it is not politically schematic. Though it is obviously directed against serfdom, the story does not suggest that cruelty is the prerogative of feudal land- owners alone, and that if only serfdom were abolished, no vigilance against such cruelty would be necessary. If power is a permanent feature of human relationships—and surely only adolescents and certain kinds of intellectuals, Marx included, could imagine that it is not—then “Mumu” is a permanent call to compassion, restraint, and justice in its exercise. That is why “Mumu” does not lose its power to move 140 years after the abolition of serf- dom in Russia; while it refers to a particular place at a particular time, it is also universal.

In making his general point, Turgenev does not suggest that his characters are any- thing but individuals, with their own personal characteristics. He does not see them just as members of a group or class, caused by oppression to act in predetermined ways like trams along their rails: and his careful observation of even the humblest of them is the most powerful testimony possible to his belief in their humanity. Grand aristocrat that he was, and acquainted with the greatest minds of Europe, he did not disdain to take seriously the humblest peasant, who could not hear or speak. Turgenev’s oppressed peasants were fully human beings, endowed with free will and capable of moral choice.

He contrasts Gerasim’s tenderness toward Mumu with the landowner’s selfish frac- tiousness. “Why should that dumb man have a dog?” she asks, without the thought enter- ing her head for a moment that “that dumb man” might have interests and feelings of his own. “Who allowed him to keep a dog out in my yard?”

Turgenev does not suggest that the landowning widow’s quasi-absolute power is in any way enviable. Although religious in a superficial and sententious way, she regards God as a servant, not a master, and she acknowledges no limits, either God’s or the law’s, to the ex- ercise of her will. The result for her is misery, a permanent state of irritation, dissatisfaction, and hypochondria. The satisfaction of her whims brings no pleasure, precisely because they are whims rather than true desires; and—used as she is to obedience, and deserving of it as she believes herself to be—she experiences all resistance, even that of time, as intolerable.

For example, when Mumu is brought in, the landowner talks to her in a syrupy, ingra- tiating manner; but when the dog fails to respond, she changes her tune. “Take her away! A disgusting little dog!” Unlike Gerasim, who has nurtured Mumu with tender devotion, the landowner wants the dog to love her immediately, just because she is who she is.

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Her power renders her dishonest and incapable of introspection. When Gerasim disap- pears after drowning Mumu, “she flew into a temper, shed tears, ordered him to be found no matter what happened, avowed that she’d never ordered the dog to be destroyed and finally gave [her steward] a dressing down.” Her denial of responsibility is breathtaking. Power cor- rupts, Turgenev knows; and the failure to accept any limitation to one’s thoughtless wishes makes happiness impossible. But no set of social arrangements, he understands, will elimi- nate these dangers altogether.

Nor does Turgenev believe that the people who are subject to the power of the land- owner are, by virtue of their oppression, noble. They are scheming and conniving and sometimes thoughtlessly cruel, too. Their mockery of Gerasim is limited only by their fear of his physical strength, and they do not sympathize in the least with his predicament. When Gavrila, the landowner’s steward, goes at the head of a delegation of serfs to tell Gerasim that he must get rid of Mumu once and for all, he bangs on Gerasim’s door and shouts “’Open up!’ There came the sound of smothered barking; but no answer. ’I’m telling you to open up!’ he repeated.

“’Gavrila Andreich,’ remarked Stepan from below, ’he’s deaf, he doesn’t hear.’ Every- one burst out laughing.”

There is no compassion in their laughter, not then and not at any other time in the story. Cruelty is not the province only of the landowner, and the heartlessness of the serfs toward Gerasim always reminds me of a scene from my childhood, when I was about 11 years old. I had gone to line up for tickets to a soccer match—in those days, for reasons I can no longer recapture, I was enthusiastic about the game. The line was long, and there was at least a two-hour wait. An old blind man with an accordion passed along the line, singing “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” while a companion held out a cap for alms. They passed some young working-class men who had a radio, and who turned the volume up to drown out his song. They laughed loudly at his bewilderment as his com- panion led him away, reduced to silence.

No one intervened or told the young men how abominably they had behaved; I was too cowardly to do so. But in that little scene, I saw man’s permanent capacity for inhumanity to man, a capacity that transcends social condition, class, or education.

An incident when I practiced medicine many years later on an island in the Pacific Ocean reinforced this lesson. Next to the small psychiatric hospital, with its yard enclosed by a high wire fence, was the leper colony. Every afternoon, the lepers would gather at the fence to mock the lunatics as they were let out for their exercise, performing their strange dances and shouting at unseen persecutors.

The victory over cruelty is never final, but, like the maintenance of freedom, requires eternal vigilance. And it requires, as in “Mumu,” the exercise of the sympathetic imagin- ation.

Turning from Turgenev to Marx (although the Manifesto appears under the names of both Marx and Engels, it was almost entirely Marx’s work), we enter a world of infinite bile— of rancor, hatred, and contempt—rather than of sorrow or compassion. It is true that Marx, like Turgenev, is on the side of the underdog, of the man with nothing, but in a wholly dis- embodied way. Where Turgenev hopes to lead us to behave humanly, Marx aims to incite us to violence. Moreover, Marx brooked no competitors in the philanthropic market. He was notoriously scathing about all would-be practical reformers: if lower class, they lacked the philosophic training necessary to penetrate to the causes of misery; if upper class, they were hypocritically trying to preserve “the system.” Only he knew the secret of turning the nightmare into a dream.

In fact, the hecatombs his followers piled up are—to the last million victims—implicit in the Manifesto. The intolerance and totalitarianism inhere in the beliefs expressed: “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.”

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In other words, there is no need for other parties, let alone individuals with their own personal quirks: indeed, since the Communists so perfectly express the interests of the proletariat, anyone opposed to the Communists must, by definition, be opposed to the in- terests of the proletariat. Moreover, since the Communists “openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,” it follows that Lenin and Stalin were perfectly right in eliminating their opponents by force. And since, according to Marx, the ideas that people have are determined by their position in the economic structure of society, it is not even necessary for people to declare their enmity: it can be known ex officio, as it were. The killing of the kulaks was the practical application of Marxist epistemology.

As you read the Manifesto, a ghostly procession of Marxist catastrophes seems to rise up from it, as from the witches’ brew in Macbeth. Take for example points 8 and 9 of the Communist program (interestingly, as in God’s program published on Mount Sinai, there were ten in all): “8. Equal liability to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with industry, promotion of the gradual elimina- tion of the contradictions between town and countryside.” Those who experienced Pol Pot’s regime, and Ceauüsescu’s “systematization,” which demolished villages and replaced them with half-completed high-rise apartments in the middle of fields, will have no difficulty in recognizing the provenance of their misfortunes.

The Manifesto makes no mention of individual human life, except to deny its possibility under present conditions. True, Marx mentions a few authors by name, but only to pour heavily Teutonic scorn and contumely upon them. For him, there are no individuals, or true humans, at all. “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”

It is no wonder, then, that Marx speaks only in categories: the bourgeois, the proletar- ian. For him, individual men are but clones, their identity with vast numbers of others being caused not by the possession of the same genes, but by that of the same relations to the economic system. Why study a man, when you know Men?

Nor is this the only generalization in the Manifesto that reduces the entire population of men to mere ciphers: “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. . . . But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. . . . The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of par- ent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor. . . . The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. . . . Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a sys- tem of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically con- cealed, an openly legalized community of women.”

There is no mistaking the hatred and rage of these words; but anger, while a real and powerful emotion, is not necessarily an honest one, nor is it by any means always ungrati- fying. There is a permanent temptation, particularly for intellectuals, to suppose that one’s virtue is proportional to one’s hatred of vice, and that one’s hatred of vice is in turn to be measured by one’s vehemence of denunciation. But when Marx wrote these words, he must surely have known that they were, at best, a savage caricature, at worst a deliberate distor- tion calculated to mislead and to destroy.

As a family man, he himself was not an unqualified success. Although he lived a bour- geois existence, it was a disorderly, bohemian one, flamboyantly squalid. Two of his daugh- ters, Laura and Eleanor, committed suicide, partly as a result of his interference in their

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lives. But not even his worst enemy could claim that he saw in his wife, Jenny von Westpha- len, “a mere instrument of production,” a spinning jenny, so to speak. Half his youthful poems were addressed to her in the most passionate and romantic terms only a few years before he wrote the Manifesto; and though their relations had later cooled, he was neverthe- less deeply affected by her death and did not long survive her. Even he, whose information about people came mainly from books, must have known that the Manifesto’s depiction of the relations between men and women was grossly distorted. His rage was therefore—as is so much modern rage—entirely synthetic, perhaps an attempt to assume a generosity of spirit, or love of mankind, that he knew he did not have but felt he ought to have.

His lack of interest in the individual lives and fates of real human beings—what Mikhail Bakunin once called his lack of sympathy with the human race—shines out in his failure to recognize the often noble attempts by workingmen to maintain a respectable family life in the face of the greatest difficulties. Was it really true that they had no family ties, and that their children were mere articles of commerce? For whom were they mere articles of com- merce? It is typical of Marx’s unrigorous mind that he should leave the answer ambiguous, as if commerce could exist independently of the people carrying it on. Only his outrage, like the grin of the Cheshire cat, is clear.

Marx’s firm grasp of unreality is also evident in his failure to imagine what would hap- pen when, through the implementation of the ideas of radical intellectuals influenced by his mode of thinking, the bourgeois family really would break down, when “the practical ab- sence of the family” really would become an undeniable social fact. Surely the increased sexual jealousy, the widespread child neglect and abuse, and the increase in the interper- sonal violence (all in conditions of unprecedented material prosperity) should have been utterly predictable to anybody with a deeper knowledge than his of the human heart.

Compare Marx’s crudity with Turgenev’s subtlety, alluded to by Henry James, who knew Turgenev in Paris and wrote an essay about him a year after his death: “Like all men of a large pattern, he was composed of many different pieces; and what was always striking in him was the mixture of simplicity with the fruit of the most various observation. . . . I had [once] been moved to say of him that he had the aristocratic temperament: a remark which in the light of further knowledge seemed singularly inane. He was not subject to any defini- tion of that sort, and to say that he was democratic would be (though his political ideal was democracy) to give an equally superficial account of him. He felt and understood the op- posite sides of life; he was imaginative, speculative, anything but literal. . . . Our Anglo- Saxon, Protestant, moralistic, conventional standards were far away from him, and he judged things with a freedom and spontaneity in which I found a perpetual refreshment. His sense of beauty, his love of truth and right, were the foundation of his nature; but half the charm of his conversation was that one breathed an air in which cant phrases and arbitrary measurements simply sounded ridiculous.”

I don’t think anyone could have said this of Marx. When he wrote that “the working- men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got,” he wrote as a man who, as far as is known, had never taken the trouble to canvass the living views of anyone but himself. His pronouncement of the death of nationalist feeling was premature, to say the least. And when he wrote that the bourgeois would lament the cultural loss that the proletarian revolution inevitably entailed, but that “that culture . . . is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine,” he failed to acknowledge the profoundly moving attempts of workingmen in Britain to acquire that very culture as a liberating and ennobling agency. It needs very little effort of the imagination to understand what fortitude it took to work in a Victorian factory by day and read Ruskin and Carlyle, Hume and Adam Smith by night, as so many workingmen did (volumes from their lending libraries and insti- tutes are still to be found in British secondhand bookshops); but it was an effort that Marx was never prepared to make, because he did not consider it worthwhile to make it. One

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might ask whether he has not set a pattern for hordes of cultivated brutes in the academy, who have destroyed for others what they themselves have benefited from.

Very different from all this, the sympathy that Turgenev expressed for the downtrod- den was for living, breathing human beings. Because he understood what Henry James called “the opposite sides of life,” he understood that there was no denouement to history, no inevitable apocalypse, after which all contradictions would be resolved, all conflicts cease, when men would be good because arrangements were perfect, and when political and economic control would turn into mere administration for the benefit of everyone with- out distinction. Marx’s eschatology, lacking all common sense, all knowledge of human nature, rested on abstractions that were to him more real than the actual people around him. Of course, Turgenev knew the value of generalizations and could criticize institutions such as serfdom, but without any silly utopian illusions: for he knew that Man was a fallen creature, capable of improvement, perhaps, but not of perfection. There would therefore be no hecatombs associated with Turgenev’s name.

Marx claimed to know Man, but as for men other than his enemies—he knew them not. Despite being a Hegelian dialectician, he was not interested in the opposite sides of life. Neither kindness nor cruelty moved him: men were simply the eggs from which a glori- ous omelet would one day be made. And he would be instrumental in making it.

When we look at our social reformers—their language, their concerns, their style, the categories in which they think—do they resemble Marx or Turgenev more? Turgenev—who wrote a wonderful essay entitled “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” a title that speaks for itself— would not have been surprised to discover that the Marxist style had triumphed.

By a curious twist of fate, the coldhearted Marxist utopians in Russia found a cynical use for Turgenev’s story “Mumu,” which they printed in tens of millions of copies, to justify their own murderous ruthlessness in destroying every trace of the former society. Could any more terrible and preposterous fate have befallen Turgenev’s tale than that it should have been used to justify mass murder? Could there be any more eloquent example of the ability of intellectual abstraction to empty men’s hearts and minds of a sense of shame and of true feeling for humanity?

Let us recall, however, one detail of Turgenev’s and Marx’s biographical trajectory in which they differed. When Marx was buried, hardly anyone came to his funeral (in poetic revenge, perhaps, for his failure to attend the funeral of his father, who adored and sacri- ficed much for him). When the remains of Turgenev returned to St. Petersburg from France, scores of thousands of people, including the humblest of the humble, turned out to pay their respects—and with very good reason.

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Ibsen and His Discontents Theodore Dalrymple

A family, Dr. Johnson once wrote, is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions. This is a less than ringing endorsement of family life, of course; and the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose childhood had been as unhappy as Johnson’s, would have agreed with this assessment. But Johnson, unlike Ibsen, went on to remark that all judgment is comparative: that to judge an institution or convention rightly, one must compare it with its alternatives. Marriage has many pains, says Johnson in Rasselas, but celibacy has no pleasures.

Johnson saw human existence as inseparable from dissatisfaction. It is man’s nature to suffer from incompatible desires simultaneously—for example, wanting both security and excitement. When he has one, he longs for the other, so that contentment is rarely un- alloyed and never lasting.

However, most people find it more comforting to believe in perfectibility than in imperfectibility—an example of what Dr. Johnson called the triumph of hope over experi- ence. The notion of imperfectibility not only fans existential anxieties, but also—by precluding simple solutions to all human problems—places much tougher intellectual demands upon us than utopianism does. Not every question can be answered by reference to a few simple abstract principles that, if followed with sufficient rigor, will supposedly lead to perfection— which is why conservatism is so much more difficult to reduce to slogans than its much more abstract competitors.

The yearning for principles that will abolish human dissatisfactions helps account for the continuing popularity of Ibsen’s three most frequently performed plays: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler. Each is a ferocious attack on marriage as a powerful source of much human unhappiness and frustration. It is this indictment that gives Ibsen his extraor- dinary modernity, a modernity that has only seemed to increase over the century and a quarter since he wrote these plays.

The scale of Ibsen’s achievement is astonishing. Almost single-handedly, he gave birth to the modern theater. Before him, the nineteenth century, so rich in other literary forms, produced hardly a handful of plays that can still be performed, and the literary power of his work has never since been equaled. It was he who first realized that mundane daily life, re- layed in completely naturalistic language, contained within it all the ingredients of tragedy. That he should have transformed the whole of Western drama while writing in an obscure language that was considered primitive—and that he should have produced in 20 years more performable plays than all the British and French playwrights of his era put together, despite their incomparably longer and richer theatrical traditions—is almost miraculous.

Though Ibsen often claimed to be a poet rather than a social critic, lacking any didac- tic purpose, the evidence of his letters and speeches (quite apart from the internal evidence of the plays themselves) proves quite the opposite—that he was almost incandescent with moral purpose. Contemporaries had no doubt of it; and the first book about him in English, Bernard Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism, published in 1891 while Ibsen still had many years to live and plays to write, stated forthrightly that his works stood or fell by the moral precepts they advocated. Shaw thought that Ibsen was a Joshua come to blow down the

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walls of moral convention. I think this judgment is wrong: Ibsen was far too great a writer to be only a moralist, and it is possible still to read or watch his plays with pleasure and in- struction, without swallowing what he has to say hook, line, and sinker.

Still, Ibsen’s influence extended far beyond the theater. He wrote as much to be read as to be performed; and his plays were published, often in relatively large editions, to catch the Christmas market. And Shaw was hardly alone in perceiving their unconventionality. Ghosts, for instance, was initially considered so controversial, not to say filthy, that its printed version was handed round semi-clandestinely, few people daring to be seen reading it. By the end of his life, however, a quarter of a century later, most European intellectuals had come to take its moral outlook virtually for granted, and anyone who continued to re- sist its teachings seemed mired in an unenlightened past.

The comparatively easy acceptance of what Shaw called Ibsenism—20 or 30 years is a long time in the life of a man, but not of mankind—means that Ibsen must have ex- pressed what many people had thought and wanted to hear but had not dared to say. He was thus both a cause and a symptom of social change; and like many such figures, he was partly right and largely wrong.

What are his moral teachings, at least in the three plays that have forged his enduring image? He was as rabidly hostile to conventional family life as Marx or Engels, but he was a much more effective and powerful critic, because his criticism did not remain on the level of philosophical abstraction. On the contrary, he laid bare the factions and revolutions of family life, its lies and miseries, in compelling and believable dramas; and while it has al- ways been open to the reader or viewer to ascribe the moral pathology exhibited in these plays to the particular characters or neuroses of their dramatis personae alone, clearly this was not Ibsen’s intention. He was not a forerunner of Jerry Springer; his aim was not titilla- tion or a mere display of the grotesque. He intends us to regard the morbidity his plays anatomize as typical and quintessential (to use Shaw’s word), the inevitable consequence of certain social conventions and institutions. He invites us implicitly, and explicitly in A Doll’s House and Ghosts, to consider alternative ways of living in order to eliminate what he considers the avoidable misery of the pathology he brings to light.

It is hardly surprising that feminists celebrate Ibsen. For one thing, his three oft- performed plays repeatedly suggest that marriage is but formalized and legalized prostitu- tion. In A Doll’s House, Mrs. Linde, a childhood friend whom Nora has just encountered af- ter an absence of many years, tells Nora that her marriage has been an unhappy one (I use throughout Michael Meyer’s excellent translations):

Nora: Tell me, is it really true that you didn’t love your husband? . . . Mrs. Linde: Well, my mother was still alive; and she was helpless and bedridden. And I

had my two little brothers to take care of. I didn’t feel I could say no. Nora: . . . He was rich then, was he? In Ghosts, too, marriage for money is a prominent theme. The carpenter Engstrand

suggests to Regina, who at this point thinks she is his daughter, that she should marry for that reason. After all, he himself married Regina’s mother for money. Like Regina, she had been a servant in the Alving household, until Lieutenant Alving got her pregnant. Mrs. Alv- ing discharged her, giving her some money before she left, and then Engstrand married her. Pastor Manders discusses the matter with Lieutenant Alving’s widow:

Manders: How much was it you gave the girl? Mrs. Alving: Fifty pounds. Manders: Just imagine! To go and marry a fallen woman for a paltry fifty pounds! The implication is that the transaction would have been reasonable, in the eyes of the

respectable pastor, if the sum had been larger: as large as the sum that had “bought” Mrs. Alving. At the play’s outset, when she is making arrangements for the opening of an orphanage named in memory of her husband, she explains something to Pastor Manders:

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Mrs. Alving: The annual donations that I have made to this Orphanage add up to the sum . . . which made Lieutenant Alving, in his day, “a good match.”

Manders: I understand— Mrs. Alving: It was the sum with which he bought me. Hedda Gabler alludes only slightly less directly to the mercenary motive of marriage.

Mrs. Elvsted is another old acquaintance of the main female character, who turns up after an absence of many years and has had an unhappy marriage. She went to Mr. Elvsted as a housekeeper and, after the death of his first wife, married him:

Hedda: But he loves you, surely? In his own way? Mrs. Elvsted: Oh, I don’t know. I think he finds me useful. And then I don’t cost much

to keep. I’m cheap. Marriage, then, is a financial bargain, and a pretty poor one—at least for women. But,

of course, there are other reasons for marital unhappiness, especially the irreducible in- compatibility of man and wife. In fact, any apparent happiness is a facade or a lie, main- tained by social pressure.

In A Doll’s House, for example, Nora appears at first to be happily married to Torvald Helmer, a young lawyer on his way up. Helmer treats her like a little girl, sometimes chiding and sometimes indulging her, but never taking her seriously as an adult; and she plays along, acting the featherbrained young woman to almost nauseating perfection. Unbe- knownst to Helmer, however, Nora has previously saved his life by obtaining a loan, se- cured by a forged signature, that allowed them to spend a year in Italy, whose warmer cli- mate cured the disease that would have killed him.

When Helmer discovers what she has done, he is not grateful and does not see her forgery as a manifestation of her love for him; on the contrary, he condemns her unmerci- fully and tells her that she is not fit to be mother to their three children. In fact, Helmer in- terprets the episode as if he were the lawyer prosecuting her rather than her husband.

The scales fall from Nora’s eyes. Their life together, she sees, has been not only an outward but an inward sham: he is not the man that she, blinded by her acceptance of the social role assigned to her, took him for. She tells him that she is leaving him; and although Helmer offers a more adult, equal relationship between them, it is too late.

Undoubtedly, Ibsen was pointing to a genuine and serious problem of the time—the assumed inability of women to lead any but a domestic existence, without intellectual con- tent (and, in fact, the play was based upon a real case). But if this were its principal moral focus, the play would have lost its impact by now, since the point has long been conceded. Ibsen was not, in fact, a devotee of women’s rights: addressing a conference on the subject in Oslo, he said, “I have never written any play to further a social purpose. . . . I am not even very sure what Women’s Rights really are.” With no faith in legislative or institutional solutions to problems, Ibsen had a much larger target: the change of people from within, so that they might finally express their true nature unmediated by the distortions of society.

In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving’s marriage is unhappy not just because she was “bought.” Her husband was a philandering alcoholic, and she fled from him after a year of marriage, tak- ing refuge in Pastor Manders’s house. Although Manders and Mrs. Alving felt a mutual attraction—indeed, fell in love—the pastor persuaded her that she had a religious duty to return to her husband. Despite Alving’s promise to change, which at the beginning of the play Pastor Manders believes that he kept, Alving continued his dissolute ways until his death. Mrs. Alving made it her task to conceal his conduct from the world and from her son, Oswald. But when Alving impregnated the servant with Regina (who is thus Oswald’s half- sister), she sent Oswald away and would not allow him to return home while Alving was still alive. While Alving drank himself to death, Mrs. Alving made a success of his estate—a success that she allowed to be attributed to Alving, permitting him to die in the odor not only of sanctity but of success.

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The lies of Mrs. Alving’s life spring from the false sense of shame—what will others say?—that traps her into returning to Alving and into covering up for him. Similarly, Man- ders, as Ibsen portrays him, represents a bogus moralism, in whose code appearance is more important than reality or inner meaning, and avoidance of shame is a better guide to conduct than conscience. This code leads Manders to make wrong decisions even in banal practical matters—for example, whether the orphanage should be insured or not. He dis- cusses this question with Mrs. Alving, noting that there had nearly been a fire there the day before. Mrs. Alving concludes that the orphanage should be insured. But then Manders in- dulges in a little oily and dishonest sanctimony:

Manders: Ah, but wait a minute, Mrs. Alving. Let us consider this question a little more closely. . . . The Orphanage is, so to speak, to be consecrated to a higher purpose. . . . As far as I personally am concerned, I see nothing offensive in securing ourselves against all eventualities. . . . But what is the feeling among the local people out here? . . . Are there many people with the right to an opinion . . . who might take offence? . . . I am thinking chiefly of people sufficiently independent and influential to make it impossible for one to ignore their opinions altogether. . . . You see! In town we have a great many such people. Followers of other denominations. People might very easily come to the conclusion that neither you nor I have sufficient trust in the ordinance of a Higher Power. . . . I know—my conscience is clear, that is true. But all the same, we couldn’t prevent a false and unfavor- able interpretation being placed on our action. . . . And I can’t altogether close my eyes to the difficult—I might even say deeply embarrassing—position in which I might find myself.

Of course, the opinions of the people whom Manders is propitiating are just as bogus as his own; and when, the next day, the orphanage does in fact burn down, because of Manders’s carelessness with a candle, he not only deems it God’s judgment on the Alving family but is clearly worried more about his own reputation than about anything else. In fact, he finds someone else—Engstrand, the carpenter—willing to take the blame for what he has done. Manders has no conscience, only a fear of what others will say.

His explanation of why he persuaded Mrs. Alving to return to her husband displays the same pharisaical fear of public opinion:

Manders: . . . a wife is not appointed to be her husband’s judge. It was your duty hum- bly to bear that cross which a higher will had seen fit to assign to you. But instead you . . . hazard your good name, and very nearly ruin the reputation of others.

Mrs. Alving: Others? Another’s, you mean? Manders: It was extremely inconsiderate of you to seek refuge with me. Once again, there can be no doubt that Ibsen has most accurately put his finger on a

pseudo-morality in which shame or social disapproval takes the place of personal con- science or true moral principle, and in whose name people—especially women—are made to suffer misery, degradation, and even violence. This is no mere figment of Ibsen’s imagi- nation. Indeed, I have observed the consequences of the operation of this pseudo-morality among my young Muslim patients, who are made to suffer the torments of a living hell and are sometimes even killed by their male relatives, solely to preserve the “good name” of the family in the opinion of others.

By no means, then, was Ibsen exaggerating. When he said that his fellow countrymen were a nation of serfs living in a free country, he meant that their fear of shame and notions of respectability enslaved and oppressed them, even in a land without political oppression.

The third of these portraits of unhappy marriages, Hedda Gabler, is the least interest- ing because it is implausible. Hedda Gabler, the daughter of a general, marries beneath herself, choosing an intellectual who hopes for a chair at the university, though he is actu- ally a petty pedant, without originality or flair. In fact, he is such a milksop, such a pathetic ninny, that it is hard to believe that Hedda, with her very high conception of her own abilities and entitlements, would have married him in the first place. It is therefore difficult to take

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her consequent travails very seriously. But she ends up killing herself, because life, with the bourgeois options it currently offers her, is not worth living.

It is in A Doll’s House and Ghosts that Ibsen offers us not just criticisms but positive prescriptions. And it is because his prescriptions are those of the 1960s, though written 80 years earlier, that we find him still so astonishingly modern and prescient.

When, in A Doll’s House, Nora tells her husband that she is leaving him, he asks her (just as Pastor Manders would have done) whether she has thought of what other people will say. He then goes on to ask her about her duty:

Helmer: Can you neglect your most sacred duties? Nora: What do you call my most sacred duties? Helmer: Do I have to tell you? Your duties to your husband, and your children. This crucial passage continues with a little psychobabble followed by the justification

of radical egotism: Nora: I have another duty which is equally sacred. Helmer: . . . What on earth could that be? Nora: My duty to myself. Nora goes on to explain that she is first and foremost a human being—or that, anyway,

she must try to become one. (This sentiment reminds one of Marx’s view that men will be- come truly human only after the revolution has brought about the end of class society. All who had gone before, apparently—and all of Marx’s contemporaries—were less than truly human. Little wonder that untold millions were done to death by those who shared this phi- losophy.) So if Nora is not yet a human being, what will make her one? Philosophical au- tonomy is the answer:

Nora: . . . I’m no longer prepared to accept what people say and what’s written in books. I must think things out for myself and try to find my own answer.

And the criterion she is to use, to judge whether her own answer is correct, is whether it is right—“or anyway, whether it is right for me.” Postmodernism is not so very modern after all, it seems: Ibsen got there first.

Moments later, Nora makes clear what the consequences of her new freedom are: Nora: I don’t want to see the children. . . . As I am now I can be nothing to them. And with these chilling words, she severs all connection with her three children, for-

ever. Her duty to herself leaves no room for a moment’s thought for them. They are as dust in the balance.

When, as I have, you have met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people abandoned in their childhood by one or both of their parents, on essentially the same grounds (“I need my own space”), and you have seen the lasting despair and damage that such abandon- ment causes, you cannot read or see A Doll’s House without anger and revulsion. Now we see what Ibsen meant when he said that women’s rights were of no fundamental interest to him. He was out to promote something much more important: universal egotism.

It is clear from Ghosts as well that Ibsen conceived of a society in which everyone was his own Descartes, working out everything from first principles—or at least what he or she believed to be first principles. For example, when Pastor Manders arrives for the first time in Mrs. Alving’s house, he finds some books that he considers dangerously liberal:

Mrs. Alving: But what do you object to in these books? Manders: Object to? You surely don’t imagine I spend my time studying such

publications? Mrs. Alving: In other words, you’ve no idea what you’re condemning? Manders: I’ve read quite enough about these writings to disapprove of them. Mrs. Alving: Don’t you think you ought to form your own opinion—? Manders: My dear Mrs. Alving, there are many occasions in life when one must rely on

the judgment of others.

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Coming from a character whom Ibsen scorns as ridiculous and bigoted, these words, which contain an obvious truth, are meant to be rejected out of hand. In Ibsen’s philosophy, everyone— at least Nature’s aristocrats, for in fact Ibsen was no egalitarian or democrat—must exam- ine every question for himself and arrive at his own answer: for example, whether the Proto- cols of the Elders of Zion is historically true—or at least historically true for him.

The object, or at least the obvious consequence, of such independence of judgment is the breakdown of the artificial, socially constructed barriers that constrain behavior and (in theory) prevent people from reaching a state of complete happiness, which is to say ab- sence of frustration. Unhappiness in all the plays results from not having followed the heart’s inclinations, either by not doing what one wants, or by doing what one does not want, all to comply with some social obligation enforced by the Pastor Manderses of the world:

Manders: . . . your marriage was celebrated in an orderly fashion and in full accor- dance with the law.

Mrs. Alving: All this talk about law and order. I often think that is what causes all the unhappiness in the world.

Mrs. Alving’s son, Oswald, has returned home from Paris not only to attend the open- ing of the orphanage named for his father, but also because he is ill, with tertiary syphilis. He is destined to die soon in a state either of madness or dementia, according to the Pari- sian specialist (French syphilologists knew more about the disease than any other doctors in the world, and Ibsen was always well informed about medical matters).

At first, Oswald—still believing that his father was a fine, upstanding man—concludes that he contracted the disease by his own conduct. In fact, he has congenital syphilis, passed on by his father. (It was formerly objected that Oswald could not have caught syphilis from his father alone, but in fact Oswald’s father could have passed on the germs to Oswald through his mother, infecting her only with a subclinical case.) For her part, Mrs. Alving is in no doubt that society is responsible for her husband’s (and thus her son’s) disease:

Mrs. Alving: And this happy, carefree child—for he [Alving] was like a child, then—had to live here in a little town that had no joy to offer him. . . . And in the end the inevitable happened. . . . Your poor father never found any outlet for the joy of life that was in him. And I didn’t bring any sunshine into his home. . . . They had taught me about duty and things like that and I sat here for too long believing in them. In the end everything became a matter of duty—my duty, and his duty, and—I’m afraid I made his home intolerable for your poor father.

The way of avoiding such tragedies is for everyone to follow his own inclinations, more or less as they arise.

Only associations free of institutional constraint will set men free. Earlier in the play, Oswald has described to the scandalized Manders the informal families among whom he mixed in bohemian Paris, after Manders tells Mrs. Alving that Oswald has never had the op- portunity to know a real home.

Oswald: I beg your pardon, sir, but there you’re quite mistaken. Manders: Oh? I thought you had spent practically all your time in artistic circles.

Oswald: I have. Manders: Mostly among young artists. Oswald: Yes. Manders: But I thought most of those people lacked the means to support a family and

make a home for themselves. Oswald: Some of them can’t afford to get married, sir. Manders: Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Oswald: But that doesn’t mean they can’t have a home. . . . Manders: But I’m not speaking about bachelor establishments. By a home I mean a

family establishment, where a man lives with his wife and children.

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Oswald: Quite. Or with his children and their mother. We go on to learn that these informal families, precisely because they are based not

upon convention, duty, or social pressure but upon unconstrained love, are not only equal to conventional families but much superior. Oswald talks of the peace and harmony that he found among them: “I have never heard an offensive word there, far less ever witnessed anything that could be called immoral.”

And he adds: Oswald: No; do you know when and where I have encountered immorality in artistic

circles? Manders: No, I don’t, thank heaven. Oswald: Well, I shall tell you. I have encountered it when one or another of our model

husbands and fathers came down to look around a little on their own. . . . Then we learned a few things. Those gentlemen were able to tell us about places and things of which we had never dreamed.

Not only are informal arrangements happier, therefore, than formal ones, but they pre- vent the spread of the very syphilis from which Oswald suffers. Suffice it to say that this has not been my experience of the last 15 years of medical practice.

The right—indeed, the duty—of everyone to decide his own moral principles and to decide what is right for him, without the Ghosts of the past to misguide him, leads Mrs. Alving to approve of incest, if incest is what makes people happy. While Oswald is still unaware that Regina is his half-sister, he falls in love with her (very quickly, it must be said), and she with him. He wants to marry her.

Mrs. Alving discusses the matter with Manders, who by now is aware of the consan- guinity of Oswald and Regina:

Manders: . . . That would be dreadful. Mrs. Alving: If I knew . . . that it would make him happy— Manders: Yes? What then? Mrs. Alving: If only I weren’t such an abject coward, I’d say to him: “Marry her, or make

what arrangements you please. As long as you’re honest and open about it—” Manders: . . . You mean a legal marriage! . . . It’s absolutely unheard of—! Mrs. Alving: Unheard of, did you say? Put your hand on your heart, Pastor Manders,

and tell me—do you really believe there aren’t married couples like that to be found in this country?

This is an argument typical of people who wish to abolish boundaries: if these bound- aries are not—because they cannot be—adhered to with perfect consistency, then they should be obliterated, as they can only give rise to hypocrisy. Mrs. Alving adds the kind of smart-aleck comment that has ever been the stock-in-trade of those to whom boundaries are so irksome: “Well, we all stem from a relationship of that kind, so we are told.”

It is not that Mrs. Alving fails to believe in right and wrong. But what is wrong is be- trayal of one’s inclinations. When Manders describes his painful self-control in sending her back to her husband when he was in love with her himself, he asks whether that was a crime. Mrs. Alving replies, “Yes, I think so.”

By the end of the play, Oswald has asked his mother to kill him with a morphine injec- tion if he has another attack of madness or dementia. In the last scene, Oswald does have such an attack, and Mrs. Alving’s last words in the play, concerning this act of euthanasia, are, “No; no; no! Yes! No; no!” We never find out whether she goes ahead, and Ibsen refused to say. But he clearly saw it as a matter for everyone to make up his own mind about, to work out for himself, free of legal—which is to say, conventional and institutional— guidance.

The modernity of Ibsen’s thought hardly needs further emphasis. The elevation of emotion over principle, of inclination over duty, of rights over responsibilities, of ego over the claims of others; the impatience with boundaries and the promotion of the self as the

176 AN INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY

measure of all things: what could be more modern or gratifying to our current sensibility? Not surprisingly, Ibsen regarded youth rather than age as the fount of wisdom. “Youth,” he assures us, “has an instinctive genius which unconsciously hits upon the right answer.”

And Ibsen was profoundly modern in another respect too. In his own existence, he was very conventional. Although attracted to women other than his wife, he always resisted temptation; he dressed correctly; he ostentatiously wore the decorations awarded him by the crowned heads of Europe—which, notoriously, he solicited. He was extremely cautious and careful with money. His habits and tastes were profoundly bourgeois, and he was regu- lar in his habits to the point of rigidity. He could be extremely prickly when he felt his own dignity affronted, and he was a great lover of formality. His wife called him Ibsen, and he signed his letters to her Henrik Ibsen, not Henrik.

His character was formed in an atmosphere of Protestant Pietism. He was inhibited to a degree unusual even among his compatriots. As a child, he experienced the trauma of his father’s bankruptcy and the descent from prosperity and social respect to poverty and hu- miliation. He both hated the society in which he grew up and craved high status within it.

Ibsen’s character was fixed, but he longed to be different. He was Calvin wanting to be Dionysius. If he couldn’t change himself, at least he could change others, and society itself. Like many modern intellectuals, he had difficulty distinguishing his personal problems and neuroses from social problems. Shortly before he wrote Ghosts, his son, Sigurd, who had lived almost all his life abroad, had been refused admission to Christiania (Oslo) University by the governing ecclesiastical authorities until he had met such entry requirements as a test of proficiency in Norwegian. Ibsen was furious. He wrote, “I shall raise a memorial to that black band of theologians.” And he did—Pastor Manders.

There is no evidence that Ibsen ever thought, much less cared, about the effect of his principles on society as a whole. This indifference is hardly surprising, given that he thought that nothing good could come of the great herd of mankind, which he termed the majority, the masses, the mob. He believed that he himself belonged to an aristocracy of intellect, and it is of course in the nature of aristocrats that they should have privileges not accorded to others. But whether we like it or not, we live in a democratic age, when the privileges claimed by some will soon be claimed by all. The charmingly insouciant free love of bohe- mians is soon enough transmuted into the violent chaos of the slums.

“[Ghosts] contains the future,” said Ibsen. He also said that he is most right who is most in tune with the future. But he did not display any interest or foresight into what that future might contain: for him, not whatever is, is right, but whatever will be, is right. Whether the scores of millions who suffered and died in the twentieth century because of the de- struction of moral boundaries would have agreed with him is another matter.

Chapter 11 177

What is Poverty? Theodore Dalrymple

What do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today, no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were—poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egali- tarian redistribution of wealth—even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.

Such redistribution was the goal of the welfare state. But it has not eliminated poverty, despite the vast sums expended, and despite the fact that the poor are now substantially richer—indeed are not, by traditional standards, poor at all. As long as the rich exist, so must the poor, as we now define them.

Certainly they are in squalor—a far more accurate description of their condition than poverty—despite a threefold increase in per-capita income, including that of the poor, since the end of the last war. Why they should be in this condition requires an explanation—and to call that condition poverty, using a word more appropriate to Mayhew’s London than to today’s reality, prevents us from grasping how fundamentally the lot of “the poor” has changed since then. The poor we shall always have with us, no doubt: but today they are not poor in the traditional way.

The English poor live shorter and less healthy lives than their more prosperous com- patriots. Even if you didn’t know the statistics, their comparative ill health would be obvious on the most casual observation of rich and slum areas, just as Victorian observers noted that the poor were on average a head shorter than the rich, due to generations of inferior nourishment and hard living conditions. But the reasons for today’s difference in health are not economic. It is by no means the case that the poor can’t afford medicine or a nourishing diet; nor do they live in overcrowded houses lacking proper sanitation, as in Mayhew’s time, or work 14 backbreaking hours a day in the foul air of mines or mills. Epidemiologists esti- mate that the higher rate of cigarette consumption among the poor accounts for half the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest classes in England—and to smoke that much takes money.

Notoriously, too, the infant mortality rate is twice as high in the lowest social class as in the highest. But the infant mortality rate of illegitimate births is twice that of legitimate ones, and the illegitimacy rate rises steeply as you descend the social scale: so the decline of marriage almost to the vanishing point in the lowest social class might well be respon- sible for most of its excess infant mortality. It is a way of life, not poverty per se, that kills. The commonest cause of death between the ages of 15 and 44 is now suicide, which has increased most precipitously precisely among those who live in the underclass world of temporary step-parenthood and of conduct unrestrained either by law or convention.

Just as it is easier to recognize ill health in someone you haven’t seen for some time rather than in someone you meet daily, so a visitor coming into a society from elsewhere often can see its character more clearly than those who live in it. Every few months, doctors from countries like the Philippines and India arrive fresh from the airport to work for a

178 AN INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY

year’s stint at my hospital. It is fascinating to observe their evolving response to British squalor.

At the start, they are uniformly enthusiastic about the care that we unsparingly and unhesitatingly give to everyone, regardless of economic status. They themselves come from cities—Manila, Bombay, Madras—where many of the cases we see in our hospital would simply be left to die, often without succor of any kind. And they are impressed that our care extends beyond the merely medical: that no one goes without food or clothing or shelter, or even entertainment. There seems to be a public agency to deal with every con- ceivable problem. For a couple of weeks, they think this all represents the acme of civiliza- tion, especially when they recall the horrors at home. Poverty—as they know it— has been abolished.

Before very long, though, they start to feel a vague unease. A Filipina doctor, for ex- ample, asked me why so few people seemed grateful for what was done for them. What prompted her question was an addict who, having collapsed from an accidental overdose of heroin, was brought to our hospital. He required intensive care to revive him, with doctors and nurses tending him all night. His first words to the doctor when he suddenly regained consciousness were, “Get me a fucking roll-up” (a hand-rolled cigarette). His imperious rudeness didn’t arise from mere confusion: he continued to treat the staff as if they had kidnapped him and held him in the hospital against his will to perform experiments upon him. “Get me the fuck out of here!” There was no acknowledgment of what had been done for him, let alone gratitude for it. If he considered that he had received any benefit from his stay at all, well, it was simply his due.

My doctors from Bombay, Madras, or Manila observe this kind of conduct open- mouthed. At first they assume that the cases they see are a statistical quirk, a kind of sam- pling error, and that given time they will encounter a better, more representative cross sec- tion of the population. Gradually, however, it dawns upon them that what they have seen is representative. When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

Case after case causes them to revise their initial favorable opinion. Before long, they have had experience of hundreds, and their view has changed entirely. Last week, for ex- ample, to the amazement of a doctor recently arrived from Madras, a woman in her late twenties entered our hospital with the most common condition that brings patients to us: a deliberate overdose. At first she would say nothing more than that she wanted to depart this world, that she had had enough of it.

I inquired further. Just before she took the overdose, her ex-boyfriend, the father of her eight-month-old youngest child (now staying with her ex-boyfriend’s mother), had broken into her apartment by smashing down the front door. He wrecked the apartment’s contents, broke every window, stole $110 in cash, and ripped out her telephone.

“He’s very violent, doctor.” She told me that he had broken her thumb, her ribs, and her jaw during the four years she was with him, and her face had needed stitching many times. “Last year I had to have the police out to him.”

“What happened?” “I dropped the charges. His mother said he would change.” Another of her problems was that she was now five weeks pregnant and she didn’t

want the baby. “I want to get rid of it, doctor.” “Who’s the father?” It was her violent ex-boyfriend, of course. “Did he rape you, then?” “No.” “So you agreed to have sex with him?”

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“I was drunk; there was no love in it. This baby is like a bolt out of the blue: I don’t know how it happened.”

I asked her if she thought it was a good idea to have sex with a man who had repeat- edly beaten her up, and from whom she said she wished to separate.

“It’s complicated, doctor. That’s the way life goes sometimes.” What had she known of this man before she took up with him? She met him in a club;

he moved in at once, because he had nowhere else to stay. He had a child by another woman, neither of whom he supported. He had been in prison for burglary. He took drugs. He had never worked, except for cash on the side. Of course he never gave her any of his money, instead running up her telephone bills vertiginously.

She had never married, but had two other children. The first, a daughter aged eight, still lived with her. The father was a man whom she left because she found he was having sex with 12-year-old girls. Her second child was a son, whose father was “an idiot” with whom she had slept one night. That child, now six, lived with the “idiot,” and she never saw him.

What had her experience taught her? “I don’t want to think about it. The Housing’ll charge me for the damage, and I ain’t got

the money. I’m depressed, doctor; I’m not happy. I want to move away, to get away from him.” Later in the day, feeling a little lonely, she telephoned her ex-boyfriend, and he visited her. I discussed the case with the doctor who had recently arrived from Madras, and who

felt he had entered an insane world. Not in his wildest dreams had he imagined it could be like this. There was nothing to compare with it in Madras. He asked me what would happen next to the happy couple.

“They’ll find her a new flat. They’ll buy her new furniture, television, and refrigerator, because it’s unacceptable poverty in this day and age to live without them. They’ll charge her nothing for the damage to her old flat, because she can’t pay anyway, and it wasn’t she who did it. He will get away scot-free. Once she’s installed in her new flat to escape from him, she’ll invite him there, he’ll smash it up again, and then they’ll find her somewhere else to live. There is, in fact, nothing she can do that will deprive her of the state’s obligation to house, feed, and entertain her.”

I asked the doctor from Madras if poverty was the word he would use to describe this woman’s situation. He said it was not: that her problem was that she accepted no limits to her own behavior, that she did not fear the possibility of hunger, the condemnation of her own parents or neighbors, or God. In other words, the squalor of England was not eco- nomic but spiritual, moral, and cultural.

I often take my doctors from the Third World on the short walk from the hospital to the prison nearby. It is a most instructive 800 yards. On a good day—good for didactic pur- poses, that is—there are seven or eight puddles of glass shattered into fragments lying in the gutter en route (there are never none, except during the most inclement weather, when even those most addicted to car theft control their impulses).

“Each of these little piles of smashed glass represents a car that has been broken into,” I tell them. “There will be more tomorrow, weather permitting.” The houses along the way are, as public housing goes, quite decent. The local authorities have at last accepted that herding people into giant, featureless, Le Corbusian concrete blocks was a mistake, and they have switched to the construction of individual houses. Only a few of their windows are boarded up. Certainly by comparison with housing for the poor in Bombay, Madras, or Ma- nila they are spacious and luxurious indeed. Each has a little front yard of grass, sur- rounded by a hedge, and a much larger back yard; about half have satellite dishes. Unfor- tunately, the yards are almost as full of litter as municipal garbage dumps.

I tell my doctors that in nearly nine years of taking this walk four times a week, I have never seen a single instance of anyone attempting to clean his yard. But I have seen much litter dropped; on a good day, I can even watch someone standing at the bus stop dropping something on the ground no farther than two feet from the bin.

180 AN INTRODUCTION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY

“Why don’t they tidy up their gardens?” asks a doctor from Bombay. A good question: after all, most of the houses contain at least one person with time on

his or her hands. Whenever I have been able to ask the question, however, the answer has always been the same: I’ve told the council [the local government] about it, but they haven’t come. As tenants, they feel it is the landlord’s responsibility to keep their yards clean, and they are not prepared to do the council’s work for it, even if it means wading through garbage—as it quite literally does. On the one hand, authority cannot tell them what to do; on the other, it has an infinitude of responsibilities towards them.

I ask my Third World doctors to examine the litter closely. It gives them the impres- sion that no Briton is able to walk farther than ten yards or so without consuming junk food. Every bush, every lawn, even every tree, is festooned with chocolate wrappers or fast-food packaging. Empty cans of beer and soft drinks lie in the gutter, on the flower beds, or on top of the hedges. Again, on a good day we actually see someone toss aside the can whose contents he has just consumed, as a Russian vodka drinker throws down his glass.

Apart from the antisocial disregard of the common good that each little such act of littering implies (hundreds a week in the space of 800 yards alone), the vast quantity of food consumed in the street has deeper implications. I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I’ve made hundreds, never—not once—have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave. And by the same to- ken, I have never seen any evidence of meals taken in common as a social activity— unless two people eating hamburgers together in the street as they walk along be counted as social.

This is not to say that I haven’t seen people eating at home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They eat alone, even if other members of the household are present, and never at table; they slump on a sofa in front of the television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating, therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative obedi- ence to impulse. Needless to say, the opportunity for conversation or sociality that a meal taken together provides is lost. English meals are thus solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I ask the doctors to compare the shops in areas inhabited by poor whites and those where poor Indian immigrants live. It is an instructive comparison. The shops the Indians frequent are piled high with all kinds of attractive fresh produce that, by supermarket stan- dards, is astonishingly cheap. The women take immense trouble over their purchases and make subtle discriminations. There are no pre-cooked meals for them. By contrast, a shop that poor whites patronize offers a restricted choice, largely of relatively expensive pre- pared foods that at most require only the addition of hot water.

The difference between the two groups cannot be explained by differences in income, for they are insignificant. Poverty isn’t the issue. And the willingness of Indians to take trouble over what they eat and to treat meals as important social occasions that impose obligations and at times require the subordination of personal desire is indicative of an en- tire attitude to life that often permits them, despite their current low incomes, to advance up the social scale. Alarmingly, though, the natural urge of the children of immigrants to belong to the predominant local culture is beginning to create an Indian underclass (at least among young males): and the taste for fast food and all that such a taste implies is swiftly developing among them.

When such slovenliness about food extends to all other spheres of life, when people satisfy every appetite with the same minimal effort and commitment, no wonder they trap themselves in squalor. I have little trouble showing my doctors from India and the Philip- pines that most of our patients take a fast-food approach to all their pleasures, obtaining

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them no less fleetingly and unstrenuously. They have no cultural activity they can call their own, and their lives seem, even to them, empty of purpose. In the welfare state, mere sur- vival is not the achievement that it is, say, in the cities of Africa, and therefore it cannot confer the self-respect that is the precondition of self-improvement.

By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civiliza- tion. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidized apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries. They come to realize that a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes antisocial ego- tism. The spiritual impoverishment of the population seems to them worse than anything they have ever known in their own countries. And what they see is all the worse, of course, because it should be so much better. The wealth that enables everyone effortlessly to have enough food should be liberating, not imprisoning. Instead, it has created a large caste of people for whom life is, in effect, a limbo in which they have nothing to hope for and noth- ing to fear, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It is a life emptied of meaning.

“On the whole,” said one Filipino doctor to me, “life is preferable in the slums of Manila.” He said it without any illusions as to the quality of life in Manila.

These doctors have made the same journey as I, but in the reverse direction. Arriving as a young doctor in Africa 25 years ago, I was horrified at first by the physical conditions, the like of which I had never experienced before. Patients with heart failure walked 50 miles in the broiling sun, with panting breath and swollen legs, to obtain treatment—and then walked home again. Ulcerating and suppurating cancers were common. Barefoot men con- tracted tetanus from the wounds inflicted by a sand flea that laid its eggs between their toes. Tuberculosis reduced people to animated skeletons. Children were bitten by puff ad- ders and adults mauled by leopards. I saw lepers with noses that had rotted away and mad- men who wandered naked in the torrential rains.

Even the accidents were spectacular. I treated the survivors of one in Tanzania in which a truck—having no brakes, as was perfectly normal and expected in the circumstances—began to slide backward down a hill it had been climbing. It was laden with bags of corn, upon which 20 passengers, including many children, were riding. As the truck slid backward, first the passengers, then the corn, fell off. By the time I arrived, ten dead children were lined up by the side of the road, arranged in ascending order as neatly as organ pipes. They had been crushed or suffocated by the bags of corn that fell on top of them: a grimly ironic death in a country chronically short of food.

Moreover, political authority in the countries in which I worked was arbitrary, capri- cious, and corrupt. In Tanzania, for example, you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone. Tanzanians were thin, but party men were fat. The party representative in my village sent a man to prison because the man’s wife refused to sleep with him. In Nigeria the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers.

Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.