The essential task of replacing ourselves

Our most important task as human beings is to successfully replace ourselves. Our lives are a transient moment in history and even the greatest of us will one day be forgotten. Recognising our own transience does not mean that our lives are meaningless, rather that our lives are part of a sequence, a very long sequence of lives. For many of us, this sequence is most immediately from our parents to our children. We hope to replace ourselves with descendants who know more, will lead better lives, and will ultimately be wiser. Replacement is important too for those without children. They can hope to inspire and teach the young, and to work with others to ensure their best values are continued. Our significance, therefore, lies in our impact on the lives of those who come after us. 

Replacement is the ongoing work of civilisation. Each generation as a whole must teach its successors the accumulated knowledge of the world, the skills needed to maintain the social and material standards of life, and the obligations we have to each other. Societies aim to achieve this through its schools and universities, but replacement is also the central task of communities, organisations and families. Successful replacement includes the preservation of human achievements, buildings and landscapes. Yet what we teach differs from what we ourselves learnt as children because we have experienced a generation of learning and adaptation. Our preferred values change over time. A world with more travel and communication is one where there is greater awareness of other ways of life and greater personal experience of different types of people. In such societies, social harmony therefore requires mutual tolerance and acceptance of diversity. But the same awareness may also generate a destructive hostility and suspicion of change. 

Replacement can therefore fail, when people refuse to learn and adapt, when children and parents no longer communicate, when institutions do not teach skills to a new generation, and when the aim of leaders becomes to create a false immortality rather than ensuring the continuity and wellbeing of their people. False immortality results in the construction of monuments to themselves. These monuments rust and crumble because egocentric rulers have little interest in putting aside the resources needed to maintain them, and so their monuments eventually remain only as trunkless legs of stone in the desert.  

This is of course a reference to Shelley’s poem Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Moving the hedges

Many years ago, I was attacked by an angry farmer and his son while walking across his land on a public right-of-way. I had not caused any damage and his anger seemed extreme and utterly disproportionate. After I had escaped, I spoke to our village policeman (who was also a long-distance walker) and he told me that the farmer was notorious. He accused every walker on his land of damaging his property. He locked up two walkers who were off-duty firefighters on the grounds that they were potential arsonists. He had disputes with all his neighbours, who he accused of the near-impossible activity of moving the boundary hedges. Although he did not use the term, the village policeman was describing a man with a paranoid personality disorder.

I have since encountered two or three more people with this disorder, and recognise common features including a belief in elaborate conspiracies against them, an extreme suspicion of others they meet, and hostility to what they regard as an invasion of their boundaries. Paranoid people see no point in debate or compromise because they regard their opponents as inherently malevolent. Instead, they believe in shouting down or otherwise silencing those with whom they disagree.

For some people with paranoid personality disorder, the invasion of boundaries may involve more than just hedges, and focuses on people who cross what they regard as inviolable boundaries of definition. One such definition is nationality. This became important from the Nineteenth Century onwards, with the creation of many new states which defined themselves as the home of a particular nation. Governments of these states usually sought to establish the boundary between those who were to be included as true members of the nation and those excluded. The definition of this boundary varied from country to country, but was usually based on language, religion or ‘blood’. This all proved a disaster for millions of people who found themselves on the wrong side of the nationhood boundary in what they had previously regarded as their own homeland. Even worse, they became the object of hatred from politicians with paranoid personalities who were able to mobilise populations against this supposed ‘enemy within’. This became particularly effective at times of war or economic collapse when it becomes easier to persuade people to adopt a paranoid way of thinking.

The consequences were organised humiliation, forced transfers of population and mass murder. This process began in Spain in the 16th Century, with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews. But it reached its apogee four hundred years later with the deaths of millions, forced transfers of populations and millions living as refugees. Many of the historic multi-national port cities of the Mediterranean, such as Alexandria, Istanbul and Salonika, were stripped of their diversity. By the middle of the 20th Century, most ‘nation-states’ in Europe had eradicated most of their national minorities. Even so, there remain people, often living near the borders, who nationalist politicians regard as having the wrong religion or language or appearance and which they seek to eradicate. In the recent past, Burma has driven out a million Rohingya people who have been denied citizenship. China is currently imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Uyghur people in the North-West of the country, and there are reports of children being separated from parents and forced sterilisation of women.

Younger populations today tend to be less nationalistic, and the new boundary that has attracted the attention of the paranoid is sexual identity. There are many conditions which result in a small proportion of the population having abnormal development of the sexual organs. Many of this group (such as those with Turner’s Syndrome) have no doubt about their gender identity. A rather larger group of people, whose sexual organs have developed in a conventional manner express concern about their gender, some of whom choose to use medicines and/or surgery to change their outward appearance to conform to what they regard as their true gender. There is nothing new about this phenomenon, and many human societies identity valued roles for men who choose to live as women or women who choose to live as men.

What is new, however, is the politicisation of transgender identities. There are three elements to this. In the first place, socially conservative people (particularly those with religious beliefs) view a change of sexual identity as a threat to the normal order of society, which some regard as divinely-inspired. The second element is the view of some feminists that men who choose to identify as women are encroaching on the special and distinctive status that distinguishes a woman from a man as well as on spaces that are traditionally reserved for women. The third element is a sympathy for transgender people because of the hostility they often encounter, the cruelty inflicted on them in various forms of ‘conversion therapy’, and the impact all this has on their mental health.

These differing views could probably be resolved by discussion and debate. But instead, the paranoid style of politics has come to dominate this new boundary of definition. Attempts are made to ban people with opposing views from speaking in public, while academics are hounded out of university for views that are deemed incorrect. In the USA, some states have passed absurd laws to ensure that people must use the toilets that are appropriate to their sex assigned at birth. Equally absurd are the two extremist definitions of gender, which mainly concern male-to-female gender transition. The first is that such people should always be defined as ‘male’, even though they identify as women, live as women, and have undergone hormone therapy and re-assignment surgery to resemble women. The second is that a man should be defined as female if they state that this is their wish, even though they continue to live as man, and have the body of a man.

At the heart of these absurd definitions is an intolerance of ambiguity. Sexual boundaries, like national frontiers, include people who do not fit within simple clear definitions. There are, and hopefully will always remain people who have multiple national allegiances, who belong to minority and diverse cultures, or who are uncertain about or wish to change their sexual identity. They will sadly remain targets for the paranoid people who seek to enforce simple definitions by inflicting suffering, but it is the responsibility of the rest of us to defend the true diversity of the human race. 

Coronavirus, utlitarianism and Emmanuel Kant

 The dispute between the UK and the European Union over vaccination against coronavirus is more than just a squabble about contracts: it shows profound differences between countries in how they make policy and the priority they give to the rights of individual citizens. This is shown by the history of the Oxford Astra Zeneca (OAZ) vaccination and the bans on its use in several EU countries. The first of these involved suspending the vaccine for the older age-groups on the grounds that insufficient numbers of the elderly had been included in the Phase 3 clinical trials. Only two months later, the same countries allowed the vaccine to be administered to the elderly but now banned its use for people under the age of 50 years because a very small number of younger people had developed abnormal blood-clots after injection. Denmark has now even banned the OAZ vaccine for people of all ages, even though the risk of blood clots is many times less than that found among women taking contraceptive medication (which of course has not been banned).

There were few such doubts in the UK, which initially placed no limitation on the use of the OAZ vaccine. However, on 7th April 2021, the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation (JCVI) reported that it:
    “has weighed the relative balance of benefits and risks and advise that the benefits of prompt vaccination with the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine far outweigh the risk of adverse events for individuals 30 years of age and over and those who have underlying health conditions which put them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 disease. JCVI currently advises that it is preferable for adults aged <30 years without underlying health conditions that put them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 disease, to be offered an alternative COVID-19 vaccine, if available. People may make an informed choice to receive the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to receive earlier protection”.

In other words, UK policy was to balance the risks from adverse reactions with the number of lives potentially saved by vaccination, but to ultimately leave the decision to the informed choice of the recipient. This approach shows the influence of two themes in British philosophy, as translated into government policy. The first is classical liberalism, in which individual citizens are regarded as ultimately responsible for their own lives, to make their own ‘informed choice’. The second theme is utilitarianism, which proposes that public policy should be based on the balance for the community as a whole between benefits (the number of lives saved) and losses (the number of people dying because of adverse reactions). It is easy to see why utilitarianism should have appealed to one of the first nations in the world to have a capitalist economy, and British governments have continued to apply the same ruthless principles in determining public policy. In the case of coronavirus, this involved spending vast sums on buying very large stocks of vaccines before their approval by the regulators, indemnifying their producers and funding drug companies to build the factories which produce the vaccines. Priority was given to delivering vaccines to those most at risk of death, and administration of the vaccine on a large scale began immediately after regulatory approval.

Neither classical liberalism nor utilitarianism has commanded much support in continental Europe, where thinkers from Emmanuel Kant onwards emphasised the valuation of each individual human life rather than regarding human lives as a means to an end (or a balance between benefits and losses). Kant lived in the German Kingdom of Prussia at a time when this was ruled by an absolutist king. Kant saw no contradiction between a respect for human rights and the lack of political rights for individual citizens. Instead, he believed that the best state of affairs was one in which the king should rule according to laws which protected the individual rights of the citizens. By this means, Kant could argue that authoritarian government is compatible with the protection of human rights, and thereby deny the principles of both classical liberalism and utilitarianism.  

Most EU governments followed Kantian principles in denying their citizens the right to choose the OAZ vaccine and in proposing that the vaccine be banned because of its possible (albeit very rare) negative impact on the health of individual recipients. In other words, the rights of each such individual were more important than the balance of benefits and losses that would result from the widespread use of the vaccine. Other, less enlightened, factors may also have played a part in their decision-making. These include a desire for revenge against Astra Zeneca because of the company’s failure to meet the agreed rate of deliveries of vaccines to the EU (and revenge against the UK for leaving the EU). Another factor may have been the desire by President Macron of France to undermine trust in a competitor to the much-delayed French Sanofi vaccine.

This all had the effect in the EU of undermining public trust in the OAZ vaccine, which has produced a widespread ‘nocebo effect’. This is the opposite of the placebo effect, in which patients claim they have benefited from a pill or treatment which has no clinical content. The nocebo effect occurs when a truly beneficial treatment is regarded with suspicion by its recipients, who then report a range of ailments they ascribe to the treatment. This has certainly been the case with the OAZ vaccine, which has been accused of causing a range of ailments in addition to the small number of blood clots with which it genuinely seem to be associated. Many of these reports can be explained by the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. This Latin phrase translates as ‘after this, therefore because of this’, which in this case means that any ailment which occurs after receiving a vaccination is blamed on the vaccination. Priority for vaccination is usually given to the elderly and those with major health problems - groups prone to experience symptoms in a given period of time whether or not they have been vaccinated.

Suspending vaccination, the nocebo effect and delays in beginning the vaccination programme caused by the desire of the European Commission to prioritise price-bargaining over the quick delivery of vaccine has greatly reduced the rate of administration in EU countries compared with the UK. The result has been deadly. At the time of writing, the UK has 30 deaths/day from coronavirus, compared with 300 deaths/day in France, 380 deaths/day in Italy and about 250 deaths/day in Germany. It appears that there is some point in utilitarianism when applied to public health. After all, what human rights do you have when you are dead?

PS. There is a fascinating example of British policy ruthlessness in the slaughter of 750,000 pets at the start of the Second World War, as a way of reducing the demand for imported food. See British Pet Massacre on Wikipedia.

Hymns, ancient and modern and incomprehensible.

One of the more miserable features of my secondary schooling (apart from sport, the cadet force, Saturday morning attendance and the dreary lessons) was morning assembly. This followed the practice at that time of a broadly Christian service comprising the Lords Prayer, various other prayers, and a couple of hymns. It was all rounded off by an address by the headmaster about various school matters. These occasionally included warning and admonishments about behaviour in the showers after sports day. Since I left for home as soon as possible after compulsory sport and avoided the showers, I had no idea what he was warning us against.

I also had no idea what the various hymns were supposed to mean. There were a few that had good tunes that could be sung with enthusiasm (Jerusalem, He who would Valiant be, Oh God our help in Ages Past), but most were dreary affairs. Even worse, their words simply made no sense. One I particularly puzzled over was Teach me my God and King. I now learn from Wikipedia that it was based on a 17th Century poem called The Elixir, written by George Herbert. The most obscure verse was:

‘A man that looks on glass,
        On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
        And then the heav'n espy.’

But this verse was hardly any better:

‘A servant with this clause
         Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
         Makes that and th' action fine.’

Even the hymns with good tunes were obscure: Jerusalem seemed to aspire for a better society, which struck me as a good idea. He who Would Valiant Be suggested that we should aim to be pilgrims. What that could involve was unclear, although I understood this better a few years later when I read John Bunyan’s book Pilgrim’s Progress. My incomprehension extended to Christian theology. I never understood the idea of the Holy Trinity and still do not.

This might of course indicate a failure on my part to comprehend abstract thought. Other people do not seem so handicapped. For several centuries, different factions of Christians argued over the precise nature of the Holy Trinity, as well as transubstantiation and justification by faith.  These arguments have at times involved warfare, persecution, torture and execution. This willingness to consider slaughter to defend an abstract idea is not of course exclusive to Christianity or religion in general. In the 20th Century, millions have been led to their death in the name of such secular abstractions as ‘the nation’, ‘communism’, ‘democracy’ or ‘fascism’. The hymns and prayers of my schooldays now seem only a feeble protection against such evil.

The original sin of babies

Many years ago, I worked as a social worker in Scotland. I lived in a pleasant village in Clackmannanshire under the lea of the Ochils, and I worked in a miserable town in West Lothian. But in both places I heard several parents say the same thing about their babies: that when they cry, they should be left to do so because it helps ‘break their spirit’. I do not know how common this view is in Scotland or whether it is unique to Scotland, but it seemed to me then to incorporate a strange and harsh idea of the nature of children and how best to respond to their needs. It is harsh because it seemed to attribute a baby’s act of communicating distress or discomfort to a desire to manipulate and control its parents. It is, in other words, a belief in original sin.

This belief, as conventionally developed by Christian theologians from St. Augustine onwards, is that human beings inherit sin from Adam, who committed the original sin of disobedience (ie eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge) in the Garden of Eden. All human beings are therefore deemed to be depraved in their nature from birth, and to lack the freedom to do good or respond to the will of God unless they receive His grace. The idea of original sin was especially favoured by the first Protestant clerics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, but would seem to have little to do with the expressed statements of Christ or the Book of Genesis.

Three of the Christian gospels have similar texts in which Christ tells his disciples not to prevent children coming to see him, and saying that “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18: 1-6). He therefore regarded children as innocent beings, not as innately depraved.

The Book of Genesis reports that God punished Adam and Eve and their descendants for their disobedience, but the punishment comprised the pain and suffering of toil, childbirth, illness and death (Gen. 3: 16-19), with no mention of the inheritance of sin. According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden to prevent a challenge to God who said: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”. (Gen. 3:22-23).

Sin therefore arises because Adam and Eve’s acquisition of knowledge provided them with the capacity to choose rather than act on instinct. This choice created the possibility of helping or harming others, and it is a choice we have all inherited because of our intellectual capacity as human beings. That we can choose evil is emphasised in the following chapter in the Book of Genesis, which tells the story of Cain murdering his brother Abel.

The doctrine of original sin involves a distinctly pessimistic view of human nature - of children as well as adults. It leads some parents to see their children as innate sinners who must be disciplined from birth, rather than innocent and curious souls driven to respond to the attention and love of their parents.

See also: No sympathy for the devils

Those who hate

I am driving along a country road. I see ahead the front end of a car beginning to pull out of a side road. I suspect that the driver has not seen me. I give a brief toot on the horn to warn him. He stops his car. As I pass, he loudly sounds his horn. I glance and see him gesturing angrily at me. As so often, he is a balding, red-faced man. He is angry because I may have saved his life. The driver would not have explained it that way at the time. In fact, I suspect he would not have explained it all, except to use words to express his dominant emotion of anger. His anger probably arose because he regarded the horn I sounded as an admonition and hence, to him, as an act of aggression.

I suspect that if I met the same man some time later, the anger would have cooled. We might even chat over a glass of beer. This is because, for most people, anger is transient  and rarely converted into hate. A few people seem to live in a permanent state of anger, but hatred is usually a colder feeling, like that of Iago for Othello - a compulsion to destroy another person, even someone with whom the hater is outwardly on good terms. Like Iago, the hater can not usually explain why they hate. There may be a feeling of envy or contempt for the object of hate. Or the person might be a member of some despised group. But in most cases, these explanations only provide a rationalisation for what is a primary, dominant and inexplicable emotion.

Those who hate have a supreme purpose in life. Those who are hated have much to fear. I remember many times when I have felt angry, usually because of my impatience or  because of frustrated ambition. I can also remember disliking some people. But I have never felt hate. I have, however, been on the receiving end of others’ hatred. After I left my job in the NHS, I went to the wedding of a former colleague. I met someone who had been a fellow NHS manager - by now rather drunk. The alcohol revealed the true man, and I listened with horror to his expressions of loathing for me - from someone who I had always counted as a friend. Sometime later, I encountered a junior female work colleague who seemed polite, quiet and very competent. I used my efforts to promote her career until I discovered that she was relentlessly using her efforts to destroy mine. Discussion and mediation failed because hating me seemed to be the main purpose of her life. She seemed to resemble a character from a crime programme, like Midsommer Murders - the person who appears up to the last ten minutes as pleasant and helpful, but who is then revealed as the crazed murderer.

We are tempted to explain the pleasure some people get from hatred, cruelty and destruction as products of their childhood or other experiences. They may collude with this biography to gain sympathy. But they rarely admit that hatred and the opportunity to impose pain and destruction on others gives them supreme pleasure. There are no reluctant torturers.. I have learnt from bitter experience that attempting to compromise does not work with those who hate - they will see it as either deviousness or vulnerability. The rest of us also need to accept that such people will always be among us, and do our best to unite against them. This is easier said than done. People who hate have a singleness of purpose and a passion that sometimes endows them with a ghastly charisma. People who are troubled and unsure in the world will respond to their leadership. At times of great crisis, most people are in such a state of mind. Their leader then emerges, singling out their enemies, towards whom all collective human venom is directed.

See also: No sympathy for the devils

Thinking about the Good Samaritan.

The parable of the good Samaritan appears in Chapter 10 of the Gospel of St Luke. Jesus was posed a question by a lawyer, as follows:

    Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, [Deuteronomy 6:5]; and your neighbour as yourself [Leviticus 19:18].” He said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live.” But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?”

    Jesus answered, “A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he travelled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, ‘Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.’ Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbour to him who fell among the robbers?”

    He said, “He who showed mercy on him.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Like many such parables, the story of the Good Samaritan can be interpreted in several ways. The simplest reading is that Jesus commended giving time and money to strangers who are in desperate need. It is the opposite, in other words, of the common statement that ‘charity begins at home’. This interpretation of the parable is exemplified by the organisation called the ‘Samaritans’, which recruits volunteers to answer phone calls from people confronting despair and contemplating suicide. The effectiveness of the Samaritans is shown by the suicide rate in the UK, which is among the lowest in Europe.

The parable of the Good Samaritan also says something important about the nature of love. Love is not just an emotional state or ‘feeling’, but an emotion expressed in action. To be saved, therefore, Jesus proposed that a person must both love God and directly help those in distress. Just loudly proclaiming that you are ‘born again’ is insufficient. Note too that the command expressed in Leviticus also requires us to love our neighbour as yourself. In other words, we are unlikely to effectively express love for others (even strangers) if we despise ourselves.

There are two further questions we can ask about this parable. The first is why Jesus specifically mentions a priest and a Levite (a tribe which had priestly functions). It may be that Jesus specified these respected members of Jewish society as a dramatic contrast with the Samaritan. But another reason may be that both priests and Levites at that time would be concerned with maintaining their ritual purity, which would have been lost if they had contacted a dead or ‘half-dead’ man. Jesus (despite the behaviour of many of those who claim to be his followers) was never critical of Judaism, but was a religious reformer. In particular, his parables and sayings emphasise that we judge people’s actions by their intent and consequences, and that this takes priority over adherence to religious law.

The second question is why the benevolent person in the parable is specifically a Samaritan. The Samaritans are a religious group (which still survives in Syria), with patterns of belief similar to Judaism. At the time of the parable, there was intense and violent rivalry between these two religions, similar to that today between some Sunni and Shia Muslims, or, in the recent past, between Protestant and Catholic Christians. So the audience for the parable would have viewed a Samaritan as an enemy. So much so, that the lawyer can not bring himself to say the name ‘Samaritan’ when Jesus asked him the question at the end of the parable.

So Jesus argued that all people - even strangers - even our enemies - are our ‘neighbours’, and therefore deserve our love. Throughout history, no words of Jesus have been betrayed as much as these. The last two millenniums have been a grim record of genocide between people from different factions of Christianity, or by Christians against people from different religions, against people who speak different languages or salute different flags, and against people with allegiance to rival ideas of how society should be organised. One example will suffice. The First Crusade, in which European Christian warriors captured Jerusalem, began with the slaughter of 8000 Jews in Germany and concluded with the mass murder of 70,000 people all religions in Jerusalem. The victorious knights literally waded in blood up to their knees on the way to church to celebrate the man who told them to love their enemies.

Private morality and public morality

A long time ago, on a train to Edinburgh, I was approached by two Mormon missionaries. As usual, these were Americans in business suits, speaking in the friendly outgoing way that is such an attractive part of their culture. They told me that becoming a Mormon would confer many advantages for my career. Mormons, they said, had such a reputation for honesty that Howard Hughes recruited only Mormons to run his business interests in Las Vegas. I pointed out that Howard Hughes was running a vast gambling enterprise in that city, which was also a major centre for (legal) prostitution. The missionaries were used to rejection, but found my point puzzling. They saw no problem in combining morality in their private life with the promotion of mass corruption in business.

I was reminded of this encounter by the recent presidential election in the USA, in which another Mormon (Mitt Romney) managed to combine a strict personal morality with a political campaign that involved a startling sequence of dishonest statements, bewildering changes of opinion on the most fundamental issues, and a set of policies that would drive millions of the poorest people in his country to even greater misery. Like the Mormon missionaries on the train to Edinburgh, he drew a clear distinction between two quite different moral standards: private morality (how we behave with our family and friends) and public morality (how we behave with everyone else).

This distinction is not of course found among Mormons alone, and is much older than the Mormon religion. The idea that we should be compassionate with our families and cruel to others probably dates from the earliest human history: we co-operate with and trust members of our own tribe, but arm ourselves against other tribes. In warfare, honest and peaceful men come together to kill strangers. The justification for distinguishing our private and public moralities is therefore that members of other tribes can not be trusted, and that our relations with them are a matter of actual or potential warfare. It is a simple matter for some people to extend this principle to the operation of politics and economics: whatever moral standards we apply to our family lives, it is assumed that survival in political and business affairs necessitates fraud and double-dealing. 

The trouble with living with this distinction is that it confirms the evils of the world. Advances in human life have come about when people have chosen to apply the ethics of their private morality to public affairs. In his great book Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild gives the example of the English sea captain John Newton. In 1748, he experienced a spiritual conversion (we would say he was ‘born again’), which led him eventually to become ordained in the Church of England and to write several hymns. The most famous of these, Amazing Grace is often mistakenly categorised as a ‘negro spiritual’. This is particularly ironic since Newton made his living by captaining ships bringing slaves from Africa to the North American colonies. Newton was apparently able to reconcile his conversion with an active role in the most brutal and cruel of all trades. Even after leaving the sea in 1754, he continued to invest in the slave trade and said nothing against it for another 34 years.

But during that time, the campaign to abolish the slave trade gathered strength. This was at first led by Quakers, who were joined later by evangelical Christians and political radicals. The campaign at some point must have produced great soul-searching in Newton, and eventually in 1788, by now a prominent Anglican clergyman, he published a forceful pamphlet denouncing the slave trade and describing the horrors he had seen as captain of a slave ship. He later became a star witness before Parliament on behalf of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and lived to see the success of the campaign with the passing of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.

So if Newton could eventually apply the principles of his private morality to his public morality and have such a positive influence on mankind, there must surely be hope even for Mitt Romney.

Working with ethical complexity

All work involves (or ought to involve) some ethical complexity, although this occurs less in some jobs than others. An ethically simple job would be the sale of lawful and non-harmful goods. The salesman is employed to sell, and receives payment to do so. The ethical requirement, therefore, is to meet the terms of his contract with his employer, which usually involves the aim of maximising sales. However, a conflicting ethical demand could arise if the salesman suspects that a customer does not need or cannot afford the product he has persuaded him to buy. The salesman may resolve this dilemma by telling himself that the customer is exercising free choice. This is more convincing if the salesman has taken the trouble to explain the full costs and features of the product. This is now often required by law, as a means of protecting consumers who would otherwise be ‘mis-sold’ products.

At the opposite end of the ethical complexity scale are occupations such as medicine, which require the frequent resolution by individual practitioners of multiple and often conflicting ethical demands. This has generated the academic discipline of medical ethics, to investigate these conflicts and propose rules for their resolution. But similar degrees of ethical complexity can occur in much poorer-paid and less well-trained occupations. For instance, support workers in residential care for people with cognitive impairments face ethical dilemmas on a daily basis. Do they allow their clients to take the kind of risks acceptable for almost all people, or do they protect them from potential harm? In more practical terms, do they allow a client who has no sense of direction and no awareness of the danger of motor vehicles to walk out into the street alone, or do they let them out only if they are accompanied by a member of staff or other responsible person? Should the staff allow a client to eat what they want, even if this results in gross obesity, or do they restrict their access to food? Do they allow a client to repeatedly hit their head against a wall, or do they restrain their limbs and insist they wear a protective helmet?

Faced by these dilemmas, support staff (and the public at large) usually favour exercising a ‘duty of care’, to protect those with severe cognitive impairments from exploitation and harm. Duties of care are most commonly experienced in the way in which we deal with children and people who are ill. It is not surprising, therefore, that some staff talk of their clients as if they are children rather than adults, or sick people rather than disabled and healthy. This is not sign of incompetence or malevolence, but a way of dealing with the real psychological stress involved between treating such a person severe cognitive impairments as an autonomous adult (as specified in numerous policy statements), while at the same time carrying out tasks that emphasise constantly their very lack of autonomy.

No sympathy for the devils

Future generations will look back on the 20th Century as the time of genocide and rock and roll. The extent of this genocide is almost beyond belief: not just the 20 or so million killed systematically by Nazi Germany and a similar number by the Japanese Empire, but also the 45 million killed in China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, the 10 million in the contrived famines associated with the ‘collectivisation’ of agriculture in the Soviet Union, and millions in Cambodia, Armenia, Nigeria, Rwanda, and many other places. Industrial scale warfare resulted in tens of millions more deaths, with new ‘weapons of mass destruction’, starting with poison gas devised by the German Empire in the First World War, and nuclear and biological weapons introduced to the world by the USA. Agent Orange, which was used by the USA in Vietnam, resulted in half a million deaths and millions of disabilities, increased risk of diseases such as cancer, and birth defects among the civilian population.

How can we explain this utter horror, this evil? The source of evil has been attributed through the ages to the devil or to devils. In Hollywood, the devil is portrayed as a deformed and deranged monster. This is a comforting depiction because it suggests that the source of evil lies outside ourselves, and that normal people are incapable of evil unless seduced into it by an alien being. This depiction of the devil as alien easily slides into xenophobia, leading people to believe that their society can be cured of evil if only they are able to eliminate foreigners, blacks, jews, communists, or some other defined minority.

But there is another quite different vision of the devil - the devil as a gentleman, suave, charismatic and persuasive, and very much one of us. This is  the version that appears in one of the 20th Century’s greatest rock and roll songs ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1968 and recorded by the Rolling Stones. In this song, Lucifer proclaims his wealth and taste. Like sophists everywhere, he argues for moral relativity: “Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints”, and for universal self-blame: “I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’, when after all it was you and me.” Yet at the root is a love of death and despair: “I watched with glee as your kings and queens fought for ten decades for the gods they made”.

This is a lot of work for one devil, and it is not surprising that many sources (such as Milton’s Paradise Lost) identify a pandemonium of devils, each of which characterises a particular kind of evil. These include Mammon, who exalts wealth, persuading us to feast while others starve. Beelzebub represents the arrogance of power, tempting those in high office to crush their rivals to maintain personal supremacy. Astaroth is the devil of accusers and inquisitors - those who enforce conformity with torture and death, while  Moloch is the demon of religious cruelty, persuading those with religious faith to stone miscreants to death, burn unbelievers at the stake and crash aeroplanes into skyscrapers. Finally, there is Belial, who works to stir up lies and hatred, and “loves vice for itself”.

Belial, like all the other devils, walk among us, or rather pass by us in their chauffer-driven cars and their private jets. They run giant chains of ‘news media’ which promote pornography and inculcate hatred of their political rivals, they manage wealthy corporations which employ workers in the Third World on starvation wages and pollute the landscape, they go to war in the name of security and ensure those they capture are tortured and murdered. They glory in personal power and crush and destroy others as an act of pleasure. They succeed because we are weak and easily impressed by ‘wealth and taste’.

The Quality of Gulag Life

In his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew on his own experience to describe life in a Soviet prison camp in the Arctic. This involved almost unimaginable suffering: imprisoned without any prospect of release for what would not be a crime in any reasonably free society; forced to work long hours in subzero temperatures; appalling food and accommodation; and a probable early death from illness, exhaustion, or murder by the guards. Yet the hero of the book looks back on his day with some satisfaction:
    “Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner; the team-leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned something from Tsezar in the evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it. A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day” (pp142-143).

This extract tells us something about how people assess the quality of their own lives. Almost everybody would rate the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov in the most negative terms, even compared with that of ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union at that time. Yet he had adapted to his way of life, and was able to win sufficient minor triumphs over adversity to regard it as ‘almost a happy day’. There is therefore sometimes a difference between a person’s quality of life rated by an observer, and that person’s own sense of well-being.

Researchers call the first of these an ‘objective measure’ of quality of life, compared with a person self-rating, which is termed ’subjective’. But these phrases are misleading because ‘objective’ measures are simply the subjective assessments of others about what constitutes the good life. Researchers may poll lots of people in a particular society about what they wish from life and hence obtain some numerical score for quality of life, but in the end they are just measuring the extent to which a particular individual conforms to other people’s subjective assessments of what makes them happy. Needless to say, some people willingly choose a way of life that would not appeal to all of us - as monks spending a spartan life of prayer, as soldiers living in barracks facing daily danger, and so on.

Of course, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov did not choose to be in a gulag, but his life there had narrowed his awareness of the alternatives. This may have been essential for psychological survival, but would also have made adaptation after release particularly difficult. Like Brooks, the elderly released prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption, suicide would have seemed a reasonable option. This raises questions about whether we should give preference to people’s own assessments of their preferred way of life over that of ‘objective’ opinion. This already happens routinely when the person in question is deemed unable to make a rational decision because of childhood, mental illness or severe learning disability. But none of us ever make a rational decision about what we wish from life, in the sense of considering and weighing all the possible alternatives. Instead, most of us choose between the limited range of alternatives we know about or just copy what other people do, while a few reckless souls leap into the unknown.

Does this mean that most of us are living in a gulag of our own making? For some people, this is true. It is possible to meet people who live narrow and restricted lives without poetry, the excitement of sport and the stimulation of friendship and good conversation. This can happen even when there are the financial means to live otherwise. My advice for escaping from such a gulag is to travel to new places when you can, try out new foods, learn new languages, make an effort to meet different kinds of people, read more and watch less television.

Read: Solzhenitsyn A (1963) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Penguin, Harmondsworth.

See also:

Looking down on others' needs

Enlightenment and Authority

In 1784, the philosopher Immanuel Kant completed an essay on the nature of ‘enlightenment’ and its implications for society. He defined the term to mean the personal transformation of people’s way of thinking, not just by the accumulation of learning, but by individual people’s willingness to derive their own conclusions about life based on their reason, intellect and wisdom. He equated ‘enlightenment’ with intellectual maturity, which he contrasted with depending on others (such as religious authorities) for one’s beliefs and opinions.

Kant was aware of the problems generated by enlightenment. Most people (even those in authority) were not yet enlightened by his definition. But if enlightenment became common, then there would be problems in maintaining order - people might choose to disobey their rulers, women their husbands, and children their parents. The answer was for enlightenment to be coupled with obedience. People could be enlightened in their private life, but should adhere to convention and consequently express accepted views in their work and public duties. The exemplary society in this respect was the Prussia in which he lived, and Kant designated his time as ‘the Age of Frederick’, named after the authoritarian king of that land.

Kant’s conclusion that enlightenment is compatible with and may even require authoritarian government has been a common stance among public intellectuals since his time. Intellectuals may not support such governments with the same enthusiasm as Kant, but they have limited power in wider society, and therefore depend on that of their rulers to ensure the application of their ideas. This has been particularly the case when intellectuals have sought to achieve major changes in the lives of the rest of us. Given the ‘unenlightened’ character of most people, and hence their probable resistance to such schemes to improve their lives, it has been particularly tempting for intellectuals to support the use of authoritarian methods to create a new kind of person. Historically, this has often involved the mass slaughter of many of the older kinds of person. Popular resistance could be rationalised as ‘lack of enlightenment’, ‘superstition’, ‘false consciousness’ and so on.

Even in more democratic societies, intellectuals may find authoritarianism tempting as a means for achieving a better life for the rest of us. Jeremy Bentham proposed an extraordinarily dehumanising regime for prisoners called the ‘panopticon’. Later intellectual reformers proposed that mental illness and intellectual disability could be best managed in vast authoritarian institutions. In the 20th century, public intellectuals argued for massive slum clearance projects, fragmenting communities and re-housing people in poorly-maintained blocks of flats built miles away from their families, employment, entertainment, shops and so on. The Red Road flats in Glasgow (shown above) were one of the extreme demonstrations of this type of social engineering.

What these exercises have in common is the belief that the good life can be discerned by reason, that it can be applied in an undifferentiated way to whole categories of people such as ‘the peasantry’ or ‘the working class’. This simplified view of the complexities and diversity of people may be a product of lack of experience and seeing the world through books and political debates rather than through observation and experience. In other words, many intellectuals are themselves unenlightened by Kant’s definition.

The Hadamar Clinic and humanity

In the summer of 1941, the staff of the Hadamar Psychiatric Clinic in Germany held a party with beer and wine to celebrate the 10,000th patient they had murdered. Initially, the doctors and nurses of the Clinic killed their patients by lethal injections. However, this proved far too slow a process, and so they devised the more cost-effective system of using carbon monoxide in fake shower rooms to kill large numbers at once. The people they murdered were a diverse group of disabled and mentally-ill people, but most had an intellectual disability (called ‘learning disability’ in the UK) and were thus deemed a threat to the efficient survival of the German ‘race’.

The policy of mass murder of people with an intellectual disability by the Nazi regime was an extension of a widely-approved public policy of eugenics. In the first part of the 20th Century, eugenics attracted support from left and right, and from leading intellectuals. Indeed, it was the more socially-progressive societies like Sweden and Canada which at that time most ardently promoted the eugenic policies of the compulsory sterilisation of people with an intellectual disability, and their incarceration in mental handicap hospitals. Eugenics became discredited by its association with the Nazis, and public policy in almost all countries today favours the integration of people with an intellectual disability into the day-to-day life of society. The old hospitals have closed, the rights of disabled people are increasingly protected, and strenuous efforts are made to improve their employment opportunities.

It is tempting to see these changes as marks of ‘progress’, in the sense of an incremental improvement of civilised values from barbarism to humanitarianism. But this would be historically inaccurate. The harsh policies associated with the eugenics movement replaced those influenced by more humane ideas in the 19th Century, which had emphasised the potential of all people with an intellectual disability for learning and social improvement. Rather than a march of progress, our recent history has been a struggle between two views of humans and their worth. Eugenics represented the idea, popularised in the Enlightenment, that human beings are distinguished from other species by their rationality. Rationality then becomes the measure by which people can be ranked, but also a means of determining the general arrangements of society. This legitimises ‘social engineering’, or the application by those in power of measures to shape the lives of those deemed less rational than themselves. A fear in the early 20th Century that the less rational sections of the population were increasing in numbers compared to the more rational created support for eugenic ideas, and led to the ultimate Nazi social engineering project at both the Hadamar Clinic and the mass industrial-scale killings that followed.

There is another and older view of humankind: that each of us possesses an essential essence or soul, that gives us our human character and by which we can be judged. The quality of our souls is unrelated to our physical strength, our intelligence, or our rank in society: a person with an intellectual disability can have a soul more worthy than that of a scientist that sneers at him. This is of course a fundamentally religious outlook, which should make us very troubled by attempts to drive out religion in the name of science. What, therefore, should be the duty of the scientist and the intellectual according to this older view of mankind? It should be to find out the truth and tell it to others, to maintain knowledge in society from one generation to another, to help people reflect deeply on their values and choices, and to do all this with humility.

New gods for old

Michael Jackson is the latest of our gods to die. Mortal gods are nothing new - many of the Roman emperors declared themselves to be gods. But they seem feeble compared with the immortal gods (favoured by Christians, Muslims and others) who can be imagined as infinitely powerful, wise and just. Those who spend their lives worshipping immortal gods therefore have an ideal set of behaviours to which they can, however imperfectly, aspire. But immortal gods lack personality and presence, particularly if their religions discourage their representation in pictures or statues. Living gods overcome these problems. They become gods because they are ever-present, not in the theoretical sense, but by being on television screens every night. Being on television places them in the special realm of true reality, of which our own lives are but a grey, flickering and imperfect reflection.

Living gods are created by their worshippers, but do not usually require any other forms of special behaviour. Their worshippers are not required to forego particular types of food or wear a special set of clothes or be more moral than the rest of us. The latter is particularly convenient because the people chosen as gods rarely lead exemplary lives. However, a true worshipper will deny any reports of their god’s wrongdoing (even pederasty and drug abuse), or regard it as a sign of the trials inflicted on the god to attain his or her status. Worship therefore involves idealising as well as idolising, and the worshipper passionately follows the lives of the god and creates special shrines in their homes of various icons of him or her. When the god dies, death is denied, symbolically and sometimes literally. The god dies in both senses when their last worshipper has passed away. Many years ago, I have met an old woman who still worshipped Rudolph Valentino and another who worshipped Mario Lanza. None surely are left alive who worship these mortal gods now, and Michael Jackson’s worshippers too will pass away over the next decades. People might still go on singing his songs though.

Looking down on others' needs

Most of us have pretty clear ideas about what we want at any point in time (food, drink, sex, peace and quiet etc), but are less good at planning our lives in the long term. Sometimes we get it right and marry a warm and sympathetic partner, get a job that pays enough and keeps us interested, and have holidays and recreations we enjoy. We then congratulate ourselves on our wisdom rather than our luck, and consider what should be done about people who are lonely or in unhappy relationships, are unemployed or in poorly-paid and tedious jobs, and who otherwise lead dreary and unhappy lives. For some people, this concern for the needs of others is part of their job. They include politicians and other policy-makers, but also a whole range of professions that make day-to-day decisions about people with learning difficulties, people with mental health problems, the elderly and infirm, and others judged incapable of making decisions about their own lives.

But this task raises a real problem: on what basis can you assess the needs of other people? One traditional solution is to assume that all people have the same needs and should live their lives in the same way (usually involving the performance by the entire community of the same religious or patriotic rituals). But in more individualistic societies, another way of assessing needs is required. Fortunately, psychologists and social researchers have the answer: detailed lists of human needs and ‘objective’ measures of the quality of life. The oldest of these categorisations of needs, and the one most people have heard of, is Mazlow’s Hierarchy.






Mazlow proposed that human beings seek to satisfy needs in a set progression, starting from the most basic physiological needs. Once these needs are satisfied, human beings can aim to satisfy successively higher needs, leading ultimately to self-actualisation and self-transcendence. What do these last two phrases mean? ‘Self-actualisation’ for Mazlow meant reaching one’s full potential, which he believed was marked by creativity, an internalised morality, spontaneity, and closeness to others. ‘Self-transcendence’ referred to peak experiences in which a person experiences a sense of spiritual fulfilment.

There are some obvious problems with Mazlow’s approach. People are too diverse to fulfill their needs in the orderly way he suggested. We can all think of examples of people who follow a different hierarchy: people who starve themselves for beauty or for religious belief, and people who seek out risk and danger. People also differ in what they regard as ‘self-transcendence’. People like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary proposed it could be achieved through drugs (so for that matter did Ian Drury in his song Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll). To most of us, however, drug-taking looks more like self-destructive hedonism. I suspect that Mazlow esteemed ‘self-transcendence’ because he was a humanist psychologist. If models wrote hierarchies of needs, they would probably place beauty and poise at the top, while footballers would place agility and teamwork. In other words, setting up a supposed hierarchy of needs becomes an implicit way of ranking other people or looking down on their needs. This would not matter too much, except that hierarchies of needs get imposed on others.

The most imposed hierarchy of all is that of rationality. Many philosophers (who as a rule are rather good at reasoning) have decided that rationality is not only at the top of the hierarchy but also the true marker of humanity. People can then be ranked according to their reasoning powers, with questions raised about the extent to which people with severely-impaired reasoning are really human. This has led to the ‘thought experiment’ by the philosopher Peter Singer and others which compares the relative worth of a severely-disabled person and one of the more intelligent animals. Singer’s views are subtle and have been misrepresented, but anxiety about this kind of though experiment are understandable. They are based on the fear that somewhere in a garret is a lonely soul planning a rise to political power in which thought experiments will be implemented. Then the killings will begin again.