The Aristos

ancient heresy of quietism), we are all aware that we do not do all the good we could. However stupid we are, there are simple situations in which we can see a clearly good course of action, and yet shirk it; however selfish we are, there are good courses that involve no self-sacrifice, and yet we shirk them.

47 For the last two and a half millennia almost every great thinker, every great saint, every great artist has advocated, personified and celebrated – or at least implied – the nobility and excellence of the good act as the basis of the just society. On their evidence its social and biological value cannot be in doubt. So it almost seems as if the great humans are wrong, as if in the commoner bulk of mankind there was some apprehension of a perverse but deeper truth: it is better generally to do nothing than generally to do good.

48 I believe this strange and irrational apathy is largely due to the religion-engendered myths that doing good will bring us pleasure – if there is an after-life, eternal pleasure – and that thus the good man is happier than the bad. The world around us is full of evidence that these are indeed myths: good men are very often far less happy than bad ones, and good actions very often bring nothing but pain. Just as he is an eternal seeker of the agent, man is an eternal seeker of the reward. He feels there ought to be some further recompense – something more than a clear conscience and a feeling of self-righteousness – for doing good. The conclusion is irresistible: doing good must bring (and therefore before the doing, promise) pleasure. If it does not, then it is a bad bargain.

49 There are two obvious ‘modes’ of pleasure. One we may call intended in that the event which brings pleasure, the meeting with a lover, the visit to a concert, is planned and intended. The second and much more important kind is fortuitous, in that it comes unexpectedly – not only the surprise meeting with an old friend, the sudden beauty of some usually banal landscape, but all those elements in the active intention to have pleasure that were not clearly foreseen. In fact, when we plan an intended pleasure we always unconsciously assume that there will be a free bonus of the fortuitous kind. Our approach is that of the traveller: to the extent that his journey is planned and has definite aims he will get the pleasure intended, but he will also expect a very large content of the fortuitous kind, both in what he intended to happen to him and in what will happen to him by chance. In this way we hedge our bets – if the planned pleasures disappoint, there are the unexpected ones, and vice versa.

50 What is immediately striking about both these modes of pleasure is that they depend very largely on hazard.

A girl may have long planned to marry. But when the wedding is finally present, is taking place, there is a sense of good luck. Nothing has happened, although many things could have happened, to prevent it. Perhaps she may look back then to the chance first encounter with the man who is now her husband; and the basic element of hazard there is overwhelming. In short, we are conditioned to see pleasure of both kinds as very largely a result of hazard. We do not arrive at it so much as it arrives at us.

51 But as soon as we treat pleasure as a kind of successful bet, and then expect this sort of pleasure from moral choices and actions, we are in trouble. The atmosphere of chance that pervades the one world will contaminate the other. Hazard rules the laws of pleasure – so let it, we say, rule the laws of doing good. Worse than that we shall come to the obvious conclusion that only good actions that promise pleasure are worth our doing. The pleasure may come from community esteem, from personal gratitude, from self-interest (the hope of good in return); from hopes of a pleasant afterlife; from being freed of the sense of guilt, if such a sense has been ‘built in’ by the cultural environment. But in each case the incentive, however necessary historically or justifiable on pragmatic grounds, creates a totally wrong climate around our intention to act well.

52 Doing good for some public reward is not doing good: it is doing something for public reward. That it also does good may seem to be its justification; but it is a dangerous justification, as I shall show.

53 There is a third less obvious ‘mode’ of pleasure to which we do not usually attach the idea, though we have the sensation, of pleasure. We may call it functional, and it is the pleasure we get from all those activities essential to our being – eating, excreting, breathing, and ultimately, existing. In a sense these are the only pleasures we cannot deny having. If we do not distinguish them very clearly it is because they are overlaid by the other two much more conscious and complex modes. If I choose what I eat, I experience the intended pleasure; if I enjoy what I eat more than I expected, I experience the fortuitous; but buried beneath is the functional pleasure of eating because to eat is to continue to exist. To use Jungian terminology, this third mode is archetypal, and I believe that from it we ought to derive our motive for doing good. In terms of bodily functions, we should evacuate good – not ejaculate it.

54 We never have a surfeit of natural bodily functions. We expect no extrinsic reward for carrying them out, since we know that the reward lies in the performance. Non-performance means illness or death, just as the non- performance of good actions finally means the death of society. Charity, kindness to others, actions against injustice and inequality should be acts of hygiene, not of pleasure.

55 What then does the functional ‘health’ thus brought about consist of? Its most important element is this: that the good action (and from ‘good action’ I am here excluding all those actions whose real motive is public esteem) is the most convincing proof we shall ever have that we do possess a relative freedom of will. Even when it does not involve acting against our self-interest, the good action requires a lack of self-interest, or conversely, an output of unnecessary (in terms of our biological needs) energy. It is an act against inertia, against what would have been otherwise determined by inertia and natural process. In a sense it is a divine act, in the old sense of divine: that is, the intervention of a free will upon matter imprisoned in its mere matterness.

56 All our concepts of God are concepts of our own potentialities. The charity and compassion that have been universally attributed to the finest – under their different outward masks – of such God-concepts are the qualities we are striving to establish in ourselves. They have nothing to do with any external ‘absolute’ reality; they are reflections of our hopes.

57 We cannot in ordinary life easily separate self-interested motives from the ‘hygienic’ one I propose. But the hygienic motive can always be used to assess the others. It constitutes a check upon them, and especially in that sadly wide category where the action seems good in the enactor’s mind but is clearly evil in its effects. There were certainly members of the Inquisition, there were Protestant witch-burners, there were perhaps even Nazi race-exterminators who genuinely and disinterestedly believed in the goodness of what they were doing. But even if one gives them every benefit of every doubt, they were all impelled by spurious rewards for their ‘good’ actions. They hoped for a better world to come for themselves and their co-believers, not for the heretics, witches and Jews they destroyed. They acted not for greater freedom, but for greater pleasure.

58 Freedom of will in a world without freedom is like a fish in a world without water. It cannot exist because it cannot use itself. The greatest fallacy of political tyranny has always been that the tyrant is free while his subjects are enslaved; but he is enslaved by his own enslaving, tyrannized by his own tyranny. He is not free to act as he wishes because what he wishes is determined, and generally very narrowly, by the demands of maintaining tyranny. And this political truth is true on a personal level. If the intention of a good action is not finally to institute more freedom (therefore, more justice and equality) for all, it will be partly evil not only to the object of the action but to the enactor, since its evil aspects will limit his own freedom. In terms of functional pleasure, it will be similar to unexcreted food, whose nutritional goodness is progressively counteracted by the damage it will do if its harmful elements are not passed out of the organism.

59 Over the last two hundred years there has been a great improvement in personal and public hygiene and cleanliness; and this was largely brought about by persuading people that the results of being dirty and apathetic in the face of disease were not acts of God, but preventable acts of nature; not the sheer misery in things, but the controllable mechanisms of life.

60 We have had the first, the physical, phase of the hygienic revolution; it is time we went to the barricades for the second, the mental. Not doing good when you usefully could is not immoral; it is going about with excrement on the hands.

6 THE TENSIONAL NATURE OF HUMAN REALITY