The Careful Use of Compliments

“Looking at him now,” said Isabel, “you wouldn’t think it, would you? So much volume in those tiny lungs.”

She carried him through to her study and sat down in the chair near the window. It still felt strange to her to have Charlie in her study, her place of work. Babies belonged to a world of blankets, colour, softness, not to this place of paper, files, telephones. And philosophy, which is what Isabel did as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, seemed so far removed from the world of infancy. Would Immanuel Kant have known how to hold a baby? she asked herself. It was highly unlikely; babies were too irrational, too messy for him, although he would have acknowledged, of course, that each baby should be treated as an end in its own right, and not as a means to an end. So one should have a baby because one wanted that baby to be born and to have a life, not because one wanted the pleasure oneself 1 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h of having a baby; that was implicit in any Kantian view of the matter. But even if he had acknowledged the essential value of every baby, would Kant have had the faintest idea how to deal with a baby? Would he even have known which side was up?

That was the cold and informal face of philosophy, Isabel thought; something far removed from the world that ordinary people knew; their world of struggle, and messy passions, and unresolved pointless differences, such as her difference with Cat. That was Kant’s child-unfriendliness established; Hume would have known about children, she decided. He would have found babies good company because they were full of emotions, unexpressed perhaps, or made known only in the crudest of manners, but emotions nonetheless. And Hume, the Good Davey as he was called, was easy company, of course, and would have been liked by babies.

Content in his mother’s arms, Charlie now seemed to be dropping back to sleep. Isabel watched as his eyelids fluttered and then closed. She could watch him for hours, she thought, whether he was awake or asleep; it was difficult to believe that she—and Jamie, of course—had created this little boy, this person, had started a whole future on its track. That struck her as little short of a miracle; that a few small cells could multiply and differentiate and create an instrument of thought and language, a whole centre of consciousness.

Grace watched her from the doorway. “Would you like me to take him up to his cot?” she asked. “So that you can work?”

Isabel handed the sleeping child over to Grace and went to her desk. Charlie’s birth had had little impact on the Review of Applied Ethics; in her determination to be prepared well in advance, Isabel had put together two special issues during her pregnancy—an issue on moral particularism in the work of Iris T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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Murdoch (“the moral dilemmas of Oxford types,” Jamie had called it) and one on the morality of boundary controls. The Murdoch issue had gone to press shortly after Charlie’s birth, and the second would be published within a month or two.

It had caused her some anxiety, this second one, because the topic was such an uncomfortable one. States are entitled to have some control over their borders—there is general agreement on that—but when they try to keep people out, then passions are raised and accusations of heartlessness made. Auden had a poem about this, which she quoted in her editorial. He had written from the perspective of a displaced person who hears the rhetoric of hate of his persecutors; and there is that arresting line that brings it home so strongly: “He was talking of you and me, my dear,” says the man to his wife. You and me: at the end of every bit of exclusion, every act of ethnic cleansing, every flourish of heartlessness, there is a you and me.

And yet, she reflected, that was written in an era of Fascism. Modern states and their officials act very differently; they have to make difficult decisions against a backdrop of human rights laws and openness. We could not all go and live in the United States or Canada or Australia, or some other popular country, even if we wanted to. At some point the people already there were entitled, were they not, to say that there were limited resources for newcomers, that their societies could take no more. Or they could argue that even if they had the space, they were entitled to preserve the existing culture of their country by controlling the extent to which others came to it; we live here, they might say—it’s ours and we can decide whom to invite in.

But then somebody might point out that the current possessors themselves, or their ascendants, had probably taken the land from somebody else, and it was not clear why that should give 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h them the right to turn away those who came later. But history might provide few firm foundations: ultimately, almost everybody came from somewhere else, if one went far enough back, and even those who asserted their rights as original peoples were often not really indigenous, but had sailed over from some other island or walked across a long-dissolved land bridge.

Isabel found this intensely difficult, and had noticed that most people simply avoided the issue or did not discuss it in the open. The heart went one way—those who want a new life should be helped to get it, if possible— but the head might look in another direction, at the pragmatic impossibility of allow-ing the unfettered movement of peoples. So there were pass-ports and quotas and restrictions, all of which amounted to a discouragement. Please don’t come, these regulations said; please don’t ask.

She looked at the room around her, at her desk, at her books. None of this would belong to her forever; it would change hands and somebody new would be here, somebody who would not even know who she had been, somebody who would look at her with astonishment if she came back, in some thought experiment, and said, That’s my desk—I want it. Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land about us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.

Still deep in thought, Isabel stared at the pile of unopened mail. The harvest of just two days, it was neatly stacked in a red metal in-tray. Much of this was manuscripts; Isabel did not accept electronic submissions to the journal—she disliked reading on-screen—and required everything that was submitted T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S

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to be printed out for her perusal. This meant that a river of paper entered the house each month, swirled in eddies about her study for a week or so, and then was guided out in a stream of recycling bags. The rejected manuscripts, those that she judged unworthy of the editorial board’s scrutiny, were often the work of doctoral students, anxious for their first publication.

Isabel was gentle in her rejection of these, expressing the hope that the authors would find somebody else willing to publish their work. She knew that this was unlikely, that the Review may have been their fifth or sixth port of call. But she could not be brutal; she had been a doctoral student herself once and remembered what it was like.