The Aristos

68 Almost all the great popular sports of the world come from Britain. But what Britain has not been able to export is the amateur ethos of the game. Most foreigners, and now many Britons, want to win at any cost within the rules; and they keep to the rules only because a game without rules is war.

69 There are means-orientated societies, for whom the game is the game; and ends-orientated societies, for whom the game is winning. In the first, if one is happy, then one is successful; in the second, one cannot be happy unless one is successful. The whole tendency of evolution and history suggests that man must become means- orientated if he is to survive.

70 The primary function of all the great human activities art, science, philosophy, religion – is to bring man nearer the truth. Not to win, not to beat another team, not to be invincible. The contemporary fuss about amateurs and professionals is nothing. Any sportsman who plays mainly in order to win, that is, mainly not for the pleasure of playing, is a professional. He may not want money, but he wants prestige, and prestige of this sort is as dirty as gold.

CULPABILITY

71 It is an old saying that crime depends on society; and no doubt the cynical answer, that society depends on crime, is equally old. One of the grimmest modern statistical facts is that not only is crime on the increase, but even on the increase relative to the population increase. And the problem of culpability is, to both society and to an education in humanity, of very far from academic significance.

72 There are two extreme views. One is that all criminals have complete free will; the other is that they have none. We live socially in accordance with the first belief; most of us, as individuals, tend to believe in the second.

73 A judge says to a criminal: the crime you have committed is a dastardly one. But he should say: the action you have done has harmed society, and is a sign that you have a diseased or deficient mind; I apologize to you in the name of society, if insufficient education is to blame, and I sympathize with you as a fellow human, if hereditary factors are to blame; I will now ensure that you have the best possible treatment and care. In the world as it is, no judge would dare to be so preposterously humane because he knows perfectly well that a judge is a dispenser of law, not of justice. We speak of the policy of the nuclear deterrent as if it is a terrible one to have to live under. But ever since the institution of law we have lived under a policy of the deterrent; not under a true human justice. An offer to try to cure is certainly not a sufficient practical deterrent to crime; but neither is a total refusal to try to cure a sufficient social response. There is a mean; and at present we are nowhere near it.

74 A sick man can reasonably hate society for sending him to prison; but not to hospital.

75 In a truly just world, cupability would clearly be a scientific, not a moral, calculation. No society is innocent of the crimes committed in it; we know very well that we call the biologically innocent legally guilty simply for convenience. The old argument here is this: if people start believing they cannot help committing crimes they will start committing those they could have desisted from.

76 But if we concede that a great majority of criminals are not responsible for their crimes, which are really committed by factors over which they have no control (genes, environment, lack of education), the way is free to treat them as we treat any other person who is seriously ill. In genetics we are still helpless; but we can control environment and education. And the education in humanity, which must be designed to alleviate a chief cause of all crime, the sense of inequality that makes social irresponsibility almost a courageous revolutionary gesture, is plainly best suited to establishing such control.

77 An important obstacle to the prevention and proper treatment of criminals is the emotional way in which we view ‘sin’ and ‘crime’. The one is of course a legacy of Christianity; and the other of Greek-Roman law. Both concepts are thoroughly outmoded and widely harmful.

78 They disseminate a shared myth: that an evil deed can be paid for. In one case by penance and remorse; in the other, by accepting punishment. Remorse gives a pleasurable and masochistic illusion that one is, though superficially evil, fundamentally good. Penance and punishment (which share the same root etymologically) appear, when they are completed, simply to define the correct ownership of the crime – and very often its proceeds. I have paid for my house and I have paid for my crime are unhappily similar sentences in their implication.

79 Sin throws an aura of impermissibility round many pleasures. In other words, it glamourizes and heightens them, since to forbid or deny any pleasure greatly increases its enjoyability, on both physical and psychological grounds. The chief ranters against ‘sin’ in history can be numbered among its leading coun- tersupporters. ‘Crime’, in the free-will significance law attaches to the word, is merely a legal equivalent of the religious term.

80 It is of use to examine the existentialist position on culpability. An existentialist says: As well as my good actions, I am my past bad actions; I cannot deny them; if I ignore their having taken place, I am a coward, a child; I can only accept them. From this some modern writers have argued that by deliberately committing a crime and deliberately, without remorse, accepting that I have committed a crime, I can best demonstrate my own existing as a unique individual and my rejection of the world of the others, that is, hypocritical organized society. But this is a romantic perversion of existentialism. I prove I exist not by making senseless decisions or committing deliberate crimes in order that they may be ‘accepted’ and then constitute a proof of the ‘authenticity’ and uniqueness of my existence, because by so acting I establish nothing but my own particular sense of inadequacy in face of external social reality; but I prove I exist by using my acceptance of past and bad actions as a source of energy for the improvement of my future actions or attitudes inside that reality.

81 Existentialism says, in short, that if I commit an evil then I must live with it for the rest of my life; and that the only way I can live with it is by accepting that it is always present in me. Nothing, no remorse, no punishment, can efface it; and therefore each new evil I do is not a relapse, a replacement, but an addition. Nothing cleans the slate; it can become only dirtier.

82 This view of crime is invaluable because it encourages freedom of will; it allows the criminal to believe he can choose, he can shape and balance his life, he can try to be his own master. Joined with the help to be given by psychiatry, it offers the criminal his best chance of never coming back through the prison gates when he is released. We need to ban the dreadful ogres of penal law and penitential religion from our prisons; and we need to regard the period immediately after release in the same way as we regard the same period after a stay in hospital. It is one of convalescence; and no released prisoner should be expected to be capable of immediate normal function in society. He will need economic and psychological support.

83 All actual law is ultimately martial law; and justice is always greater than the law.

ADULTHOOD

84 Another unhappy result of the pressure economic needs exert on our educational systems is the abrupt way we terminate education at far too young an age. In many parts of the world the great majority leave school for ever with the arrival of puberty. When the age of leisure finally comes to the world we can surely hope that this absurdity will stop.

85 The essential factor in evolutionary survival is self-intelligence. The truest and most valuable recompense that the individual can find in being individual (existing) is the same – self-intelligence.

86 It is difficult to acquire any real self-intelligence before the age of thirty. Part of the joy of being young is that one is on the road to self-knowledge, that one has not arrived at it. Yet we consider that even the best general education should be over by the age of twenty-one.

87 There are three stages of self-indulgence: childhood, adolescence and pre-adulthood (the period between eighteen and thirty). We educate a child out of its myths and its monotonous egocentricity; but fewer and fewer dare to correct the adolescent, and no one dares to correct the pre-adult.