The feast of Morlocks and Eloi
Theodore Dalrymple is a prison doctor who has seen the unpleasant underclass side of life at close range over many years. A main theme he often touches on in his writing is that ideas have consequences. In particular, when the culture is devoted to ideas of hedonism, self-justification and self-indulgence, rather than to ideas to ordinary decency, courtesy, and self-discipline, it is the poor who suffer the most.
The first was about the unthinkable and daily evils of totalitarianism.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=3895&sec_id=3895
Evgenia Ginzburg, author of the brilliant and terrible memoir, Into the Whirlwind, leaves her apartment to go to the local headquarters of the NKVD, having been called there for a supposedly friendly chat about someone she knows, her husband says to her, ‘Well, Genia, we’ll expect you back for lunch,’ and she replies, ‘Goodbye, Paul dear. We’ve had a good life together.’ She knows, as he does, that she is never going to see him again this side of the afterlife: which is to say never. Thus a fathomless world of pain and sorrow is expressed in those few simple words that shames our vociferous complaints about nothing very much.
… The pain and sorrow as Evgenia Ginzburg expressed was a mass, everyday phenomenon. I remember what a professor told me when I visited the Baltic States just before the Soviet Union collapsed about his childhood in the late 40s: that he never went to bed other than fully-dressed, so that he would have clothes to travel in if the secret police came to the door in the early hours of the morning (they always came in the early hours of the morning). And another professor told me he remembered the trucks that would draw up at his school, whereupon names would be called out of those children who were to get in them and never be heard of again. A tenth of the population of the Baltic States was deported in those years.
Murders and deportations on the scale practised in the communist countries could not have taken place without the co-operation and even the enthusiasm of large numbers of people.
[…]
According to Solzhentitsyn, the sine qua non of mass murder as a way of life, or as an industry, is ideology.
[…]
It is curious how even now, after all the calamities of the twentieth century, the lengths to which people are prepared to go to pursue an end is taken by others as a sign of the worthiness if not of the end itself, at least of the motives of the extremists. The fact that people are prepared to blow themselves up in an attempt to murder as many complete strangers as possible is taken as proof of the strength of their humanitarian feelings and outrage at a state of injustice.
The greatness of a crime is thus a guarantee of the greatness of its motive
The second article is about the lassitude of modern liberal democracy:
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=4438&sec_id=4438
This man nevertheless became eligible for parole. As conditions of parole, the board told him he must not drink, smoke cannabis or frequent certain places. The man told the board that he would abide by none of these conditions, but he was released on parole anyway. Within a short time, he had killed three people and so maimed a fourth that she will never recover.
The second case was of a man with many previous convictions, some for violence, who abducted and murdered a young woman aged 24. He was imprisoned and applied for bail. Three times he was turned down, but a fourth judge granted him bail. He was sent to live at a certain address, where he befriended his neighbours, who did not know that he was accused of murder. Eight months later, while babysitting their children, he killed one of them.
Perhaps the most extraordinary twist of this terrible tale is that the parents of the murdered child then had another baby, which the social services then removed from them on the grounds that they had previously entrusted a child to the care of a murderer and were therefore irresponsible parents. The state blames its citizens for the mistakes – if that is what they are – that it makes.
What lies behind this terrible, wilful incompetence?
[…]
I think in large part it comes from the intellectual and moral zeitgeist that intellectuals have created … those who make the mistakes do not pay the price for them. They feel the warmth of generosity without feeling the cool current of responsibility.
My comment: one reason why I am conservative is that I find the alternatives are intellectually unsatisfactory. The secular humanist makes a great claim to being reasonable, and of overthrowing old traditional systems of law and morality as mere arbitrary superstition: but once one abandons tradition, customs, laws or religion, the only logical alternatives for a philosophy of life are either a newly-minted secular ideology, which takes upon itself many of the aspects of a religious cult, or a life without ideology, which is another word for hedonism or utilitarianism or even nihilism. Both are unreasonable.
The reality of life is that men are not Houyhnhnms: the attempt of Fallen Man to live life according to Reason, if it does not carefully take into account the weakness and folly of Man, will end merely by unleashing the passions Reason is meant to keep in check: ideologues as devoted to idealism as idolaters to Moloch become devoted to untruth: Orwellian political correctness is one result.
(I consider the US Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the English Common Law and the Enlightenment writers on which the American system is based, to have taken into account the weakness and folly of man, which accounts for the success of the American experiment in living according to Reason. The French and Russian revolutions were not so cynical, and not so salutary.)
The experience of the Twentieth Century is summed up in the two articles I quote above. Ideologies without religion are simply deadly to body and soul. The promised utopias never come to pass, but instead nightmarish regimes infinitely worse than whatever Batista, Czar or Weimar the reformers vowed to replace.
On the other hand Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, leads to displeasing results, and Utilitarianism turns out to be inutile, and Nihilism is nothing at all. Hedonist philosophies lead to lawlessness and moral frivolity.
It may be a law of psychology that no man devoted to self-indulgence can devote himself justice; for justice would condemn him. Hedonism shelters him from life and its consequences, and so the Hedonist is philosophically incapable of taking the consequences of his actions seriously. The disintegration of the normal legal features of the state, the duty to secure the physical safety of its citizens, is a by-product of modern notions of rights-based hedonism: I indulge only in mild hyperbole to call it anarchy. Certainly in the realm of public decency and private conduct, they are anarchists.
Why do the tyrants and bloody mass-murderers of the modern totalitarian ideologues get along so well with the dimwitted intellectuals of the modern anarchists? They should be opposites.
There should be no reason whatsoever for the Eloi of the West to fawn and flatter and applaud the Morlocks of the East, who consume the lives and souls of men. But hedonism, which is irresponsibility of the passions, and ideology, which is irresponsibility of the intellect, both see a natural ally in each other, much the same way the devils of Hell, however they might hate each other, all know against which King they separately rebel.
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Let me close with another quote from Dalrymple. He is complaining about the modern idea, not that man has a right to pursue happiness, but that man has a right to be provided happiness, in this particular case, the right to medicine and medical care disbursed from the coffers of Our Stepfather, the State. He details the folly of distributing free recreational drugs to drugs addicts.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=3671&sec_id=3671
I am astonished at how quickly the doctrine of rights has colonised minds, like bacteria on a Petri dish. Not long ago, I asked a young patient what she was going to do with her life (I am sufficiently interested in my patients to ask such things). She said she wanted to study law. Any particular branch, I asked, thinking she might want to do criminal law, which is the most interesting, if least lucrative, branch?
“I want to go into human rights,” she said, with that semi-beatified smile with which a girl of her age might once have claimed to have a vocation.
“Oh yes,” I said, “and where do human rights come from?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, are they just there, like America, waiting to be discovered by someone going out and looking for them, or are they conferred by mere human agency, in which case they can be repealed at the drop of a law?”
She looked appalled, as if I were a deeply wicked man who had suggested that, for example, racial discrimination was just the thing.
“You can’t ask that,” she said.
Theodore Dalrymple does not pause to explain why the puritan-totalitarians and the hedonist-anarchists both assume the prerogative of being moralists, despite that they serve as close to the perfect opposite of morality as can be envisioned. In both cases, I suspect the reason is the cost-effect ratio of claiming the moral high ground, once morality is unhinged from traditional notions of law, fair play, philosophy or religion.
In the first case, the totalitarians are zealous for their cause because human psychology in inclined to zeal. If there is no God, man will worship Material Dialectic. If there is no Heaven, man will yearn for the People’s Soviet Utopia of Tomorrow. If there are no saints, there is Che. If you do not adore the martyrs, you end up adoring the beasts that consume them. The totalitarians assume the moral high ground because it is the most satisfying prospect from which to view the pile of skulls totalitarians pile up, the loot of ruined lives, the best place to hear both the moans of prison camps and the silence of the mass-graves. If you can loot and lie, prey on the weak, commit acts of piracy, organize gulags and show-trials, and lie and lie and lie, and the useful idiots will continue to applaud you as long as you claim to be helping the poor and heralding the future, the claim costs you nothing to make, and gains you the admiration of the principalities and powers of this world and the flattery of their servants.
In the second case, the greatest pleasure of the Hedonist is to playact at being a moralist. The pleasure of wine and women and song are as nothing compared to he pleasure of bathing in the glow of self-righteousness; and this hunger for praise is directly proportional to the absence of praiseworthy behavior. Hence, the Hedonist eventually becomes the Pharisee.
The formula for Modern Phariseeism is simple, as first discovered by Marx: take some inescapable aspect of reality, such as the scarcity of resources, and pretend that you have the right to unreality. You have the right, not merely to have other people provide you with food and shelter, but to have other people abolish the laws of supply and demand.
Or you take some inescapable aspect of human existence, like marriage, which logically requires chastity and decency for the institution to operate, and pretend you have a right to have other people applaud you for your sexual perversions and gross indecencies. The people cannot merely serve you, they must also praise you, and not by word or look cause your delicate nerves any disquiet at all.
Or take some universal institution, like politeness, condemn it as dishonest to excuse yourself from its rigor, and then accuse any who disagree with you of being insensitive and highly insulting.
No matter what they give you, demand more. And when they do not provide (for they cannot) accuse them of oppression.
It is a cheap and easy trick. The prerequisite for this formula is that you be utterly, entirely shameless.
It works as well for frivolous matters as for serious: you can accuse others of oppressing women when they insists on agreement of number in sentences containing a pronoun. Got that? Proper grammar is Hitlerism. The absurdity of this example merely shows that he formula for moral preening can be applied usefully to any question, any topic.
You too can be a crusader without ever having to go fight the Paynim. You can enjoy the palm of martyrdom without suffering the discomfort of being a martyr. With this formula, one enjoys the pleasure of the moral high ground without actually taking the tedious effort to climb it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
