“Prefer being dead.” The words went echoing through Spandrell’s mind. Everard Webley lying on the floor, trussed up, like a chicken. Did he prefer being dead? “All the same,” he said slowly, “some things must always remain absolutely and radically wrong. Killing, for example.” He wanted to believe that it was more than merely low and sordid and disgusting. He wanted to believe that it was also terrible and tragic. “That’s an absolute wrong.”
“But why more absolute than anything else?” said Rampion. “There are circumstances when killing’s obviously necessary and right and commendable. The only absolutely evil act, so far as I can see, that a man can perform is an act against life, against his own integrity. He does wrong if he perverts himself, if he falsifies his instincts.”
Spandrell was sarcastic. “We’re getting back to the beasts again,” he said. “Go ravening round fulfilling all your appetites as you feel them. Is that the last word in human wisdom?”
“Well, it isn’t really so stupid as you try to make out,” said Rampion. “If men went about satisfying their instinctive desires only when they genuinely felt them, like the animals you’re so contemptuous of, they’d behave a damned sight better than the majority of civilized human beings behave today. It isn’t natural appetite and spontaneous instinctive desire that makes men so beastly—no, ‘beastly’ is the wrong word; it implies an insult to the animals—so all-too-humanly bad and vicious, then. It’s the imagination, it’s the intellect, it’s principles, it’s tradition and education. Leave the instincts to themselves and they’ll do very little mischief. If men made love only when they were carried away by passion, if they fought only when they were angry or terrified, if they grabbed at property only when they had need or were swept off their feet by an uncontrollable desire for possession—why, I assure you, this world would be a great deal more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it is under our present Christian-intellectual-scientific dispensation. It’s not instinct that makes Casanovas and Byrons and Lady Castlemaines; it’s a prurient imagination artificially tickling up the appetite, tickling up desires that have no natural existence. If Don Juans and Don Juanesses only obeyed their desires, they’d have very few affairs. They have to tickle themselves up imaginatively before they can start being casually promiscuous. And it’s the same with the other instincts. It’s the possessive instinct that’s made modern civilization insane about money. The possessive instinct has to be kept artificially tickled by education and tradition and moral principles. The moneygrubbers have to be told that money-grubbing’s natural and noble, that thrift and industry are virtues, that persuading people to buy things they don’t want is Christian service. Their possessive instinct would never be strong enough to keep them grubbing away from morning till night all through a lifetime. It has to be kept chronically gingered up by the imagination and the intellect. And then, think of civilized war. It’s got nothing to do with spontaneous combativeness. Men have to be compelled by law and then tickled up by propaganda before they’ll fight. You’d do more for peace by telling men to obey the spontaneous dictates of their fighting instincts than by founding any number of Leagues of Nations.”
“You’d do still more,” said Burlap, “by telling them to obey Jesus.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Telling them to obey Jesus is telling them to be more than human. And, in practice, trying to be more than human always means succeeding in being less than human. Telling men to obey Jesus literally is telling them, indirectly, to behave like idiots and finally like devils. Just consider the examples. Old Tolstoy—a great man who deliberately turned himself into an idiot by trying to be more than a great man. Your horrid little St. Francis.” He turned to Burlap. “Another idiot. But already on the verge of diabolism. With the monks of the Thebaid you see the process carried a step further. They went over the verge. They got to the stage of being devils. Self-torture, destruction of everything decent and beautiful and living. That was their programme. They tried to obey Jesus and be more than men; and all they succeeded in doing was to become the incarnation of pure diabolic destructiveness. They could have been perfectly decent human beings if they’d just gone about behaving naturally, in accordance with their instincts. But no, they wanted to be more than human. So they just became devils. Idiots first and then devils, imbecile devils. Ugh!” Rampion made a grimace and shook his head with disgust. “And to think,” he went on indignantly, “that the world’s full of these creatures! Not quite so far gone as St. Anthony and his daemons or St. Francis and his half-wits. But of the same kind. Different only in degree. And all perverted in the same way—by trying to be nonhuman. Nonhumanly religious, nonhumanly moral, nonhumanly intellectual and scientific, nonhumanly specialized and efficient, nonhumanly the business man, nonhumanly avaricious and property-loving, nonhumanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, nonhumanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts. Perverted toward goodness or badness, toward spirit or flesh; but always away from the central norm, always away from humanity. The world’s an asylum of perverts. There are four of them at this
