MORALITY
Not only are all the virtues not one, as the stoics taught, not one of the virtues is simple and indivisible. Like all the rest of our qualities, they are discrete and disconnected, not integrated or unified. ‘No specific virtue or vice in a man,’ wrote Shaw, ‘implies the existence of any other specific virtue or vice in him.’ Each of them is made up of a congeries of skills and predispositions, some of which you may be proficient in, while the one next door you may have no aptitude for.
For wickedness to thrive, it needs no more than opportunity. But virtues need a diligently policed regime of restraints and penalties.
Virtues are markers of caste. And it would be as indecent to have the virtues of another caste as it would be to fail to have those of your own.
A deed counts for as much as the person who does it. But the person who does it counts for no more than the deeds that he or she does.
The difference between a good person and a bad one is luck and circumstance.
Even where a slave morality holds sway, all the slaves are would-be tyrants.
1 Codes of virtues
In order to give some reality to moral freedom and the moral sphere, Kant had to shift it to the realm of the thing in itself, the noumenal beyond time and space. That is, he had to show that it has no reality at all.
Utilitarians hold that the plain matter-of-fact test of the moral value of an act is, what consequences does it have? But consequences are the very thing that we can’t foresee, because they are endlessly ramifying. Where does the chain of effects come to a standstill? And how can the doer discern what they will be? How could the person who first tamed fire guess that the act would end in burning up the world?
Codes of right and wrong lag a few hundred years behind common practice, though the lag is getting shorter. They seem so pristine because they are so antique.
2 Negative virtues
The golden rule, to do to others as you would have them do to you, holds in the negative at most, as Confucius framed it. We would no doubt like others to bow down to us and pander to our every whim and do all our bidding. But none of us has the right to receive or the duty to render this. The most you can expect or are obliged to do is to cause as little harm as you can and to tender the help that you can’t refuse.
3 The unnaturalness of natural law
Natural law proscribes things that are natural, and prescribes things that are unnatural. If we were to live in accord with our own nature, we would sin, betray, murder and go mad, more than we would be virtuous, loyal, kind or sane.
Nothing is less innate than our innate sense of right and wrong. And few things are more unnatural than our conception of natural law. ‘Man corrupts all that he touches,’ as Montaigne wrote, yet he loves to hold forth on what is clean and natural as he does so.
Natural law is no more natural than divine law is divine. They are both convenient projections of human prejudice.
The one realm in which natural law has no place is nature. The notion of natural law and natural rights turns the order of nature on its head.
The most repressive regulations are too weak to keep us within the pale of natural law. Societies have had to make marriage a binding legal contract because monogamy is so unnatural.
It is our so-called instinctive beliefs that set us on to kill one another.
Few eternal laws last as long as written ones.
Few acts are more natural than the crimes and abominations which natural law proscribes. And few norms are more artificial than those that natural law underwrites, such as property and wedlock.
4 Natural virtues, natural vices
Our virtues are more at variance with nature than our vices. And if our artificial virtues have any function, it is as a sauce to flavour our natural depravity.
Original sin may be the sole trace that remains of the nature we have lost. And all we do is act it out in ever more unnatural ways.
Pristine natural virtues are made a fetish in old, sophisticated and corrupt epochs.
If we have a good nature, then when we do good, we are merely following our bent, and there is no merit in our acts. But if our nature is evil, even if we do good, we are still evil, and we have no merit. And if virtue is in accord with our nature, as the stoics argue, why is it so hard? But if it’s so easy and smooth, as Montaigne says, why do so few people give themselves to it?
Virtue is quite easy, not because it is so natural to us, but because it is so conventional and convenient.
If we approve of a trait, we say that it lifts us above the beasts or else that it is natural. But if we disapprove of it, we say that not even the beasts possess it or else that mere brutes do. ‘When a man is treated like a beast,’ observed Kraus, ‘he says, “After all I’m human.” When he behaves like a beast he says, “After all I’m only human.”’
5 The moralist and the virtues
A moralist blasts your innocence by opening your eyes to it. Once you’ve heard that it is more blessed to give than to receive, the fine freshness of your generosity wilts. And when you have been commanded to do good in secret so that God will reward you openly, your unforced acts lose all the charm of unselfconsciousness. And how could the meek retain their meekness, when they have been promised that they will one day be overlords of the earth?
How could anyone who set up as a great moral preceptor, like Seneca, Rousseau or Tolstoy, be more than a great moral hypocrite, a grotesque centaur of self-abasement and mad pride?
Solemn moralists seem to set out to bore us into goodness. They might succeed in turning us off vice, if they could make it as tedious as they make virtue.
It is said that adjectives are the most morally salient parts of speech. No doubt. There are none more smug, subjective, empty, rhetorical, judgmental and exaggerated.
6 Manners not morals win the praise
In this judgmental but superficial world, you are praised or blamed more for the way in which you do a deed than because the deed on its own is kind or cruel. Do a small favour charmingly, and you will win more applause than those who do more good with a bad grace. We like or loathe people more for their habits and manners than for their morals.
What people want from you is the flannel forbearance that won’t thwart their own self-interest or ulcerate their own self-love. What they ask of you is not your best but what will gain them most and ask least of them. They wish you to be flexible and complaisant but not sternly just. And they will love you more for your indulgent bad taste than for your severe good deeds. ‘In the intercourse of life,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘we please more by our faults than by our fine qualities.’
7 The virtues of means and ends
Moralists like Kant tell us that we must treat human beings in every case as ends and not as mere means. But if we could not use each other as means, we would not have much to do with one another at all. ‘Man,’ as Rousseau wrote, ‘is the chief tool of man.’
Treat people as ends in themselves, and they will take it as an invitation to treat you as an abject means which they are free to use for whatever ends they please.
Why should we treat all persons as ends, when that’s not even how they treat themselves? They use themselves up to achieve their real ends, which lie outside them.
If, as Spinoza says, all who are governed by reason must wish for mankind the good that they wish for themselves, then it is clear that no one is governed by reason.
8 Thrifty virtues
‘Virtue,’ as Walpole wrote, ‘knows to a farthing how much it has lost by not being vice.’ It keeps a thrifty store, and insists that all its services be paid for in full, be it in this world or the next. And we store up in our minds till the end of our days the good deeds for which we think we have been short-changed.
Most people expect to be well-paid for their good deeds, but the truly righteous don’t care if they lose by them, so long as they can make others suffer on account of them. They are willing to make their own lives a misery, so long as they can make it hot for their enemies.
Nice people are willing to do just enough for you to put themselves in the right. And nasty people will go out of their way to do what will put you in the wrong.
I do good to my neighbours, in the prudent hope that they will do the same to me.
My faults scald me, but I am loth to part with them. And though my virtues don’t cost me a cent, I’m glad to get rid of them. ‘Vice,’ as Colton wrote, ‘has more martyrs than virtue.’ Right is so easy, but wrong is still so seductive.
SELF-INTEREST
9 Self-interest plays the role of all the virtues
We daub our self-interest in the livid tints of the vices and virtues. And we curse those who scrape these back to lay bare the dun stuff that underlies them. We gild our interests with a thin flake of bright virtues, to distract the eye and to extract a dearer price for them. Careerism dons the decorous outfit of integrity to walk up and down in the world.
Our greed disciplines us better than our self-knowledge. It is our self-seeking more than our self-awareness that keeps us to the straight path. What small desires won’t we set aside to make way for our baser schemes?
Justice and the virtues are composed of noisy interests, but in such sweet consort that they make an even music.
You may be as offended by self-interest as a platonist is by the flesh, but what else could you live by? When we are not acting for our own gain, it’s some more crooked motive that has set us on to act.
There’s nothing that egoism won’t use for its own ends, even friendliness. ‘Self-interest,’ as La Rochefoucauld says, ‘speaks all sorts of tongues, and plays all sorts of roles, even that of disinterestedness.’ Far from slowing us down, our slippery virtues and ideals help to grease the wheels of our steely self-promotion.
Our selfless devotion is nine tenths self-promotion.
10 Adversity improves us
Setbacks make us no better. All they do is train us to push our schemes with more guile or more force. Some trials seem to improve us because they damp down the high spirits which would flash out in random delinquency. And some trials cow us into virtues and blanch us to a whitened righteousness.
If we had been as untouchable as the gods, we would have been stupider and more vicious than the worst of the fiends.
Our selfishness is the cause of most of our suffering, and our suffering makes us more selfish.
Affliction might make us more self-aware. But it makes most of us more stupid and more self-righteous.
Life makes such a mess of us, that we would make an even worse mess, if we were granted a second life. La Bruyère claimed that we do not live long enough to profit from our faults. But if we lived longer, the sole profit we would reap from them would be to make them so much worse.
11 Polluted by pain
The victims of one genocide volunteer as the expert perpetrators of the next. The bullied don’t dream of a paradise in which no one is bullied. They dream of the day when they will get the chance to bully their persecutors in return. His lambs love the Lord, because he is the biggest bully of all. ‘Those to whom evil is done,’ wrote Auden, ‘do evil in return.’
Pain does not purify us. It pollutes us. The blaze and hail of purgatory would make us fit for the underworld, not for the upper one. And yet a few years of bliss would harden the saints to the pleas of the damned. Heaven and hell must be sinking by the day. How could the saints not be corrupted by their joy? And how could the lost souls not be brutalized by their torments?
Suffering makes people punitive and cruel. And much of the suffering that they undergo is in their own minds, while that which they inflict is all too real.
12 Beware of the drowning
Unfortunates long to have sharers in their gloom. And some, if they find none, will go out of their way to make them. They are sterile in everything except the propagation of their misery.
Who are more brutal? The drowning who would pull you down into the murk for the bare chance of one more breath? Or those speeding along on the surface who drive them off with clubs for fear that they might reach their goal one hour late?
If there is anyone more ruthless than those who are resolved to rise, it’s one who is desperate to be saved from going under.
MORAL ACTING
13 Posing virtues
Most of our good intentions are mean thriftiness or gaudy heroics. Most of the time we practise a strict moral economy. But we revel now and then in a pantomime of moral extravagance, thick with splendid attitudinizing, high words, eye-catching stage-effects, bottomless sympathy, tough dilemmas and fine sentiments, in the vaporous and sublime vein of Sand or Rilke. The moral sense, finding that indifference or self-interest has long occupied most of our acts and emotions, migrates to our words and gestures.
Our life is not a charged melodrama of moral choice. And yet we still love to declaim like moral posers. Our brains have been addled by virtues and ideals, or by the fine shows of them, or by the desire to seem to dote on them.
There will be no end to our moral mummery and posturing, at least not till it has made an end of us. Our deeds are so morally bland, that we have to pepper them with benevolent self-flattery to give them some smack of seductiveness. There was no need for Jesus to warn us not to hide our lights under a bushel.
Anyone who seeks to appeal to the better angels of our nature finds that they are too deafened by their own pious squawking to heed the summons to do good.
14 The virtues of hypocrisy
Our decent impostures make up more than half of our integrity. ‘Hypocrisy,’ La Rochefoucauld wrote, ‘is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.’ But it may be just as true that virtue is the tribute that vice pays to hypocrisy. How could our misshapen natures straighten out but by dissembling? As Goldsmith phrased it, ‘Till, seeming blessed, they grow to what they seem.’
In order to do good, we have to tell ourselves that we are good. But when we do so, we may grow irretrievably evil.
I mimic bad people’s motives and good people’s stratagems for disguising them. The fine deeds that we do may be the sole excuse for the foul motives for which we did them. It’s just as well that the improvement of the world doesn’t hinge on the intentions of its improvers.
What devils we would be, if the devil didn’t persuade us to hide our true selves so that we might make our way in the world.
15 Living up to our own poses
The self-righteousness that tells us that we are better than we seem may spur us to become better than we are. And yet we end up as fake and hollow as the virtues we impersonate. We are dazzled by the images of greed and grow genuinely greedy. And we fall in love with the images of goodness but behave like mere actors.
Our vanity and our hypocrisy may be two of our best traits. In all our low compromises with the world, what else could call us back to the high aims that we once aspired to? ‘Virtue would not go so far,’ as La Rochefoucauld tells us, ‘if vanity did not keep it company.’
Don’t we feel some of our most sublime moral moods when we strain to live up to the pose that mere circumstance has forced us to put on? Wilde speaks of ‘that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do finer things than we are ourselves.’
16 Virtues and prejudices
Moralists do their best to pull down the rest of our prejudices and set up in their niche the one good-natured prejudice that all prejudices err. But a virtuous prejudice is as much a prejudice as a vicious one, though it may pass for a high precept. And good prejudice is the one force strong enough to thrust out bad. And one virtue may drive out another. Our moral medicines work by homeopathy.
Our moral scruples are adjustable, but our moral prejudices don’t budge. The first shift with our self-interest, but the second are held fast by our self-regard.
We prefer people to principles, not out of benignity but out of self-concern, to which principles would give no purchase.
Those who are striving to live up to their principles commonly have to give ground to those who are jostling to feed their preferences.
SELF-CONTROL
17 The virtues of self-control
I lack the wisdom which would warn me to duck the punches of misfortune. So I need the grudging self-government which helps me to brave them. We can’t hold out against the lure of our brute desires, and so we have to learn to bear up under the brute pains they bring on us. I grow hard to everything save my own cravings, which I’m too soft to resist.
We can change the world more easily than our own will. There are few things that we know less than our own self. And there are few things that we can control less than our own cravings.
We try to control events, since we are too weak to defeat our urge to bend them to our will. And we seek to control ourselves, the better to control what is outside us.
Many temperate people don’t learn to restrain themselves, but merely to dodge the provocations which would rob them of their self-restraint.
Some people pretend to control their compulsions by concealing them. They seem mature because they have learnt to hide how childish they are. They have rigged out their own immaturity with the gear which is tailored to master the world’s immaturity. And they grow more cunning in pursuing their puerile schemes.
18 The virtues of weakness
We have to be strong enough to hold on, since we are too weak just to let go.
Man of bronze. He was so weak and prone to wounds, that he had to encase his heart in brass, and then dig from that carapace all that was soft and human. Why wonder that what he made of himself should ring so hollow? He shuddered at the least touch. So he had to muffle himself so that life wouldn’t deafen him. Some people have to hollow out their hearts to gain the nerve to commit a titanic crime, and some just to keep up a lean subsistence.
How could the strong, who can bear so much, guess how much the weak have to bear just to keep up their own weakness? The poor frail people, who have souls of porcelain, but long to be admired like marble. They must be tenacious of life, who find the flask dry but go on pouring from it from day to dismal day. We get no rest from our frailties. They cling to us like limpets, and devour us like lice.
Our own infirmities prey on us, whether these are our faults or our virtues. Which of us does not bear the brand of Blake’s ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’?
How weak you have to be, to find your true strength.
Frailty may make you firm, and timidity may make you bold.
COURAGE
19 Courage and the virtues
Courage may be the mainstay of all the virtues. But it is the mainstay of all the vices too. And we would be far more vicious, if our cowardice didn’t keep the rest of our desires in check.
Courage is not so much a virtue as a core competence, like patience, constancy or prudence. You may be armed with all the rest of the virtues, but if you lack courage, you can’t put them to use.
Courage may be the source of the rare acts of heroism that we do, but it is fear and cowardice that keep us from straying from the well-trodden path of good conduct most of the time.
If people had more courage, they would trample down all justice. You need as much courage to fight for a bad cause as for a good one. And you would need far more daring to become an outlaw than to remain a law-abiding citizen. Some people join the police because they lack the courage or initiative to be hoodlums.
What extraordinary tenacity you need just to get through a single hour on this ordinary earth. As Woolf says, it is ‘very, very dangerous to live even one day.’ All that you own is at stake each instant, regardless of how little you have to play for.
Who needs more fortitude, the few who die glorious but alone in the van, or the mass who fall unsung in the ranks?
20 The courage of despair
The wise know why they should give up hope. But the brave carry on as if they did not. It may take as much staunchness not to scare yourself with phantom frights as it does not to flinch from real ones.
Those who are weak to dare must be strong to endure. Some people have to use up all their strength to extricate themselves from the effects of their own follies and frailties. Cowardice foists on them such rigours, that it leaves them no choice but to act bravely. And their madness gets them in such scrapes, that they have to use all their reason to get out of them.
When you meet with disaster, you may shake off the fetters of your fears, once you have learnt that if you can bear this then you can bear anything. Or else you may see that anything might scar you, and so you fall back to a trench of consternation, from which you may never climb out. In middle age you come to see that there’s no infamy or calamity that you can’t ride out. And then you know that you should despair for real.
The true test of courage comes when your luck runs out. Then you have nothing to fight for, but you must still see it through to the end. And you’re left alone in the night with your despair, like Antony abandoned by his god.
21 False courage
Heartlessness makes up half of our courage, as squeamishness makes up half of our compassion. Those who are merely insensitive boast that they are unsentimental. They scorn the teary responsiveness of others, till they find that they have need of it in their own case. Their resilience is a ruthless insensibility.
We have the worst kind of endurance, the hardihood to persist in our mean schemes for as long as they cost others more than us. We ought to have had the constancy to say no to them from the first.
All of us are sustained by the false faith that we are too important to come to rack. But this same conviction prods the dauntless to sprint on, and the spineless to hang back. The latter fancy that they are too precious to be put in harm’s way, the former that they are so invulnerable that nothing could harm them.
Brave soldiers are ready if need be to die for their country, but their real business is to kill for it.
GRATITUDE
22 Generosity
Our impulses are generous, but our hands are stinting. Our second thoughts would hold back what our first would give. Twain prescribes that when fired by an urge to contribute to a charity, all we need do is count to sixty-five. We find that it costs much less to promise than to pay. A lot of our intentions start better and end worse than our acts. And a large brood of them are stillborn. We are liberal on a whim, but miserly by habit. ‘Don’t trust first impulses,’ enjoined Talleyrand, ‘they are all munificent.’
I am loath to give more of myself to others for fear that they will take too much or that they will spurn what I offer.
I give gifts to show off my own taste and to mould the taste of others.
We are mean but wasteful. We are neither thrifty nor generous. I scatter thoughtlessly, but don’t give liberally. We are scrimping, yet squandering.
Spendthrifts may seem generous, since they are willing to waste their spare cash on all sorts of things, even other people.
23 Mean virtues
We grow attached to people when we give them gifts more than when we receive gifts from them. ‘Men are never attached to you by favours,’ as Napoleon said.
Be generous to a person, and from then on they will take it that you must owe them something. The more you give to them, the more they feel you are in their debt. What generosity gives rise to is not gratitude but greedy expectation.
Dependent people don’t doubt that they are of more use to their patron than their patron is to them. And who can tell which of them is the more smirched by their interaction.
People’s avid expectations touch us nearer than their gratitude. Their very unthankfulness goads us to give more, if only to show them that we weren’t angling for their thanks.
People give you things that they don’t want and you don’t want, and think that you ought to feel grateful to them. ‘A benefactor,’ Napoleon said, ‘demands more than he gives.’
‘It is the nature of men,’ Machiavelli said, ‘to be bound by the patronage that they confer as much as by that which they receive.’ Doing good binds us to repeat it more than receiving good binds us to repay it. So it’s our pride more than our kind heart that piques our generosity.
24 The pride of gratitude
The proud alone feel uncomfortably indebted. They are too haughty to submit to benefactions. So they try to avenge the good that others do them by displaying how appreciative they are. ‘There are minds so impatient of inferiority,’ Johnson wrote, ‘that their gratitude is a species of revenge.’ They are both ways of settling scores and reinstating our place in the estimation of others.
Some people will never forgive you for the harm that they do you. And some will never forgive you for the good that you do them.
I expect others’ thanks when I do good to them as much as I resent them expecting mine when they do good to me. And I find gratitude to them as irksome as I find theirs to me natural.
I take offence at the churlishness of those who decline to accept from me the scant favours that cost me nothing.
I’m disappointed with everything that I’m given, and it may be with gratitude most of all.
25 Ingratitude
I unhesitatingly acknowledge small favours, as I do my small faults, so that I won’t have to acknowledge big ones at all. And I show least gratitude for those benefits that I least deserve.
Gratitude is said to cost us dear, but is there anyone who has been sent broke by it? Scott notes that it is not prone to ‘distress itself by frequent payments.’ And though praise doesn’t cost us a cent, we still don’t like to give it away.
Those who feel that they owe no debt to their own parents are indignant at the ingratitude that their children show to them.
Even the most grateful people reserve the right to give you a good hard kick in return for what you’ve done for them.
26 The pride of ingratitude
Some people try to dispense with their debts by displaying their gratitude, and some by pretending that they have no need to. The former pay them off, and the latter act as if they did not exist. Those who resent the burden of a boon may make a show of being thankful, in order to shuck off the weight of their dependence. They feign gratefulness so as to be spared from feeling it. It is the virtue of those who can’t bear to be beholden.
People are so unappreciative, because they set too low a price on what others give them and they set too high a price on what they get for themselves. What they prize dearly they come to believe they have earned by their own unaided efforts. The self-regard of the receiver devalues what the self-regard of the giver sets such store on.
Few of us feel very remorseful or beholden. We set our own worth too high to reckon that we owe much to those whom we have harmed or to those who have helped us.
Our ingratitude is as sincere as our conceit. And our gratitude is as feigned and grudging as our modesty. How could we feel grateful? We can’t see that we have a thing to thank our benefactors for.
27 Gratitude and resentment
Gratitude is as feeble as it is forgetful. And resentment is as fierce as it is retentive.
Need can drive people to revere their helpers or to resent them. And some try to hide their own thanklessness by abusing them. They behave despicably, to show that they are not mean. So it’s just as well that few of us feel so beholden to our benefactors that we need to disguise our debt to them by detesting them.
It is only human parasites that both love and resent the host by which they live.
The wine of gratitude soon sours to a vinegar spleen. Our sense of indebtedness soon curdles once it’s been through a brief churning in our mind.
Animals take things for granted, and the result is contentment. We take things for granted, and what we feel is ennui, ingratitude and resentment.
Giving and gratitude make such a soup of pride, spite, expected dividends and bad faith, that cold monetary exchange smells pure and clean when set beside them.
JUSTICE
28 Justice
Love and justice are both blind. But justice refuses to see persons, while love fails to see everything else.
Karma commonly acts in reverse order. It first inflicts the punishment which will cause you to commit the sin for which the punishment will be the just desert.
God may be just, but he waits so long to make amends, that he is apt to do further harm by his attempts to set things right.
If God plays a role in the chain of retribution, he only helps to keep the wheel of injustice turning, which is a devil’s office.
The unjust, if they don’t see their assailants justly castigated by the world, at least have the satisfaction of knowing that the world is unjust. And this gives them the right to persist in their wrongdoing.
Criminals merely break the law. Judges corrupt it.
Lawbreakers ought to be punished with stern finality for their crimes, for the very reason that their nature left them no choice but to commit them. ‘Lack of free will,’ as Proust wrote, ‘makes faults and crimes more reprehensible.’
29 The ego, the root of all injustice
As Pushkin said, other people are mere zeroes and placeholders. They derive their value from their affiliation with us, who are the countable units. In the deathly arithmetic of self one is greater than infinity. So it is the task of justice to lop each of us to an equal integer, and tell us that we count for no more than one of these.
The personal ego is the source of all injustice. And yet justice exists to serve our group egoism.
We fail to spot the most flagrant wrongs, so long as they are profiting us.
Much of our tolerance is cold indifference. We let pass the evil that people do because it has not touched us.
Most people slake their thirst for justice by pressing their own claims to fair treatment.
30 The sheep and the goats
Justice cuts the world in two. It segregates it into sheep and goats, clean and unclean. And the sheep forthwith bleat that their wool is as white and downy as cherubs’ wings, and that they have the right to browse in a fat paddock. They wait meekly for the coming of their good shepherd to butcher the goats and shove them in the ever-burning oven.
God shows leniency to his lambs, but not so much as justice to the kids. And this is what the lambkins call grace. They hate and fear the goats, but they love the slaughterer who comes to massacre them.
When the sheep make the laws, then look out, goats. As one of the goats, one of the impure, the unclean, the spotted, the cursed, the filthy, I don’t much look forward to the reign of the immaculate lamb.
31 Justice is injustice to what is unlike us
We put our trust in a person or a state or a god, not because we expect them to do right, but because they are so strong that they have the right to do wrong, and we hope that they will do it on our behalf.
The moral law is an offence against nature. It tells us to be kind to all living things that are like us who are trampling on all living things that are not like us.
How would we stand condemned, if the animals were to demand of us a tenth of the justice that we demand of a god.
Justice draws categorical distinctions where there are none, and fabricates unqualified similarities where there are none. And then it asserts that we have disparate duties to these disparate tiers of beings that it sets up.
Justice entrenches our egoism by extending it. We have duties to those breeds of life that are of the same grade as our own. But we have none to all the rest. What we term justice is a mere bias in favour of what is kin to us at the expense of what is not.
32 Our virtues, our due
People presume that right is what they are used to doing, and that justice is what they are used to obtaining. They deem their innate rights to be whatever they are in the habit of receiving plus the bit extra that they don’t doubt they deserve.
If they meet with good luck, people gather that what is rightfully due to them is what they are accustomed to get. And if they don’t, they gather that it is what others get. If they fail repeatedly, they feel that they have a right to fare well for a change. And if they fare well, they infer that they should not have to fail when they have grown so used to winning. Yet they guess that others, if they have met with ill-luck all the time, must be inured to it, while if they have fared well, they are now due their quota of blows.
We are sure that our great talents give us the right to keep what we have got, and that our bad luck gives us the right to do whatever we need to even the odds.
33 Virtues and deserts
I wish that justice governed the world, and at times I fear that it might. ‘Life is never fair,’ Wilde said, ‘and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.’
It is the just who get their comeuppance in this world. The corrupt stride on from one shining triumph to the next.
How swiftly mischief can turn the whole world upside down. Yet what long centuries we have taken to rip up rooted injustices. ‘Haste is of the devil,’ says Muhammad, ‘slowness of God.’
None of us complains of injustice when we get more than we have earned the right to. And which of us these days has not done that? ‘Nobody minds having what is too good for them,’ as Austen wrote. Nothing is good enough for some people, though they themselves are not good for much. We who make the worst use of everything have no doubt that we deserve to have the best of all things.
34 Duties and virtues
I have to tell myself that my obligations are more pressing than they are, so as to bestir myself to perform them. There are times when I can do my duty only by inflating its importance and my own.
A light imposition galls me more than a large one. A light one comes so close to being nothing that I could envision being rid of it.
Most people are not slothful or undutiful. But they seem so to me, since they are too intent on doing what they want to do, to do what I would have them do.
Nature seduces us by making purpose seem to be the same as pleasure. And society seduces us by making duty seem to be the same as interest.
Filial piety is the first of the virtues. Too bad that most parents deprive us of the desire to practise it.
35 Self-important virtues
Johnson remarked how ‘all this notion about benevolence arises from a man’s imagining himself of more importance to others than he really is.’ My self-importance tells me that I have duties to others, since they can’t do without me.
I’m sure that few achievements would lie beyond my scope, if I could be spared from the far weightier work that it’s incumbent on me to do now. I could easily run the country. But who is there that could run my stall? Each of us is like a mouse trapped on its treadmill. And we know that it’s our own speed that keeps this vast world spinning.
The work-ethic is a moral screen which we use to hide or justify our greed and self-importance.
36 Maudlin mercy
When clemency is more than an anomaly, it is an iniquity. And where it grows to be a system, it puts an end to justice. ‘A God all mercy,’ as Young wrote, ‘is a God unjust.’ Pity twists our principles, but won’t set straight our conduct.
Justice works by mathematics, mercy acts out a lachrymose play. So justice looks cold, and mercy heartfelt. The cry of mawkish people is always for more charity and less justice. And so they will connive in inverting all right.
Fiction is full of stories of the ills that flow from requiting evil with evil. But the mayhem that would result from requiting evil with good is too rare an occurrence to be worth delineating.
SELF-SACRIFICE
37 The calculating virtues of altruism
You ought to do some charity from time to time, to still your rankling remorse, burnish your good name, and buy a superstitious indemnity against misadventure. But altruism can snap the bands that are sewn by reciprocal self-interest. And egoism can knot the sturdiest bond of all, the bond of common frailty which makes us feel how much we must lean on one another. ‘It is through our mutual dependence,’ Voltaire reminds us, ‘that we are helpful to the species.’
Why do we put ourselves out in every way save the one that might do real good? We fetch others aid in the small things that they could do for themselves, while abandoning them to drown in the deeps. But don’t we do the same in our own case? ‘Our friends,’ Hazlitt notes, ‘are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.’ They are keen to give you things for which you have no use but which will cast them in a good light.
How nobly I would lay down my life, if the world were so ordered that I would lose nothing by it.
We may be willing to love our neighbours in an abstract way, but we won’t let them get the start of us in any real contest.
How much low guile we use to steal a march on our rivals. Yet what childish tricks inveigle us to lay down our lives for a cause that we scarcely care for.
38 The virtues of self-sacrifice
You affirm your self most powerfully and permanently by surrendering it for the sake of some worthier end. You enlarge it by sacrificing it for the rest of the souls in whom it will continue to live and who will continue to live through it. So you live on in a more extensive being, for which you have no more need of your self as it now is. Like the athenians overrun by the persians, you quit your land to save your country.
There are people who have such unique gifts, that it would be as unjust for them to act selflessly as it is for the rest of us to act selfishly.
Some people forget themselves in a cause that gains them nothing. But they are no less selfish for that, since it has come to make up such a large part of their self.
‘The man who is readily disposed to lay down his life,’ Pavese wrote, ‘is one who does not know how else to give meaning to it.’ Live for others, and you will be spared the hard work of finding your own strong reason to live.
39 Self-sacrifice sacrifices others
To forward our schemes, we are ready to damage our own happiness. And how much readier we are to damage the happiness of others. Those who give up a little of their own good for a cause won’t balk at giving up a great deal more of others’ good. And those who have the charge of the welfare of many feel that they must have the right to disrupt scores of lives to safeguard it. ‘Self-sacrifice,’ says Shaw, ‘enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.’
Those who impair their self-interest to keep up their self-regard don’t doubt that they are urged on by a high principle. And when they rein in their self-regard to push their own self-interest, they judge that it is self-surrendering duty that sets them on.
Those who are not doing just what they wish would have us believe that they are magnanimously discharging their duty. And those who deem that they are discharging their duty don’t doubt that they have a mandate to use any means they need to gain their ends.
In this age of the inviolate individual altruism does not mean the sacrifice of each for the good of all. It means the sacrifice of the common good for the good of a few.
40 Self is the idol of altruism
A code of selflessness will end up making us more self-obsessed. It sets up the human self as the sole good, which all our acts must serve. The cosmos contains no richer gem. So by trying to act altruistically we will grow more clamorously selfish, but our selfishness will be more shrunken and sterile.
By encouraging people to act for the sake of other selves, you won’t induce them to act unselfishly. You will merely teach them that the human self is the sole end worth acting for.
Altruism is no more than a less expeditious way of feeding the aggregate of selfish human wants. Self-seeking may look unlovely, but unselfishness works inefficiently. I don’t even know where my own good lies. So how much less could I judge what might be good for others or how to come at it? ‘Be sure that you give the poor the alms that they most need,’ Thoreau warned.
We cause ourselves so much harm by our passionate self-love, might it not be just as well for our neighbours that we don’t love them in the same way?
41 Waste of altruism
The self is neither an end nor an enemy but a tool. Try to act philanthropically, and you blunt it. Try to act disinterestedly, and you wear it out to aid other tools as if they were the true work.
Why should I feel for the pain of others? It’s no doubt as ugly, boring and sordid as my own. There’s no reason to think that any other human self would be less ugly and worthless than my own.
Treat your neighbours as if you loved them, and you’ll soon find out how loveable they are.
In this world it is the finer self that learns to sacrifice itself for the sake of the worse.
42 The egoism of altruism
I take it that I win high merit when I spend my own paltry self to help others just as paltry, and that these paltry selves must be priceless because I have effaced my own self for their sake, and that what is akin to me but not me must have an inestimable worth. To love your neighbour as yourself would be to overvalue two objects at once. An egoist tramples on rival selves, and an altruist tramples on all that is not self. Pride alone might inspire you to raise up some work that will overpass all self.
We praise dogs for their selflessness, because their selfish subservience plays up to our own selfish need to lord it over them.
Even those who live for others live for those others who are their own, their family, friends, tribe or nation.
Don’t the saints feel that the rest of us are on earth to serve as the grateful recipients of their own virtues? How else could they ram their way to their beatific reward? ‘We are all here on earth to help others,’ Auden wrote. ‘What the others are here for I don’t know.’ Such is the benign circularity of self-surrender. The virtues always act in the service of some ego, whether it is the prudence that picks out the best way to push our own self-interest, or the good will that works on behalf of another’s.
See also: Pity, Conscience, Vices, Politics