The Aristos

1 Why do we think this is not the best of all possible worlds for mankind? Why are we unhappy in it?

2 What follow are the great dissatisfactions. I maintain that they are all essential to our happiness since they provide the soil from which it grows.

DEATH

3 We hate death for two reasons. It ends life prematurely; and we do not know what lies beyond it.

4 A very large majority of educated mankind now doubts the existence of an afterlife. It is clear that the only scientific attitude is that of agnosticism: we simply do not know. We are in the Bet Situation.*

5 The Bet Situation is one in which we cannot have certainty about some future event; and yet in which it is vital that we come to a decision about its nature. This situation faces us at the beginning of a horse race, when we want to know the name of the winner. We are reduced at worst to guessing it with a pin and at best to forecasting it intelligently from the evidence of past form, condition in the paddock, and all the rest. Most serious gamblers know that their interest is better served by the second method; and it is this method we should use when we come to wager on the race between an afterlife and a total extinction. We have two horses, but of course three choices, since we can argue that it is best not to bet – that is, to remain agnostic.

6 To Pascal, who first made this analogy with the bet, the answer was clear: one must put one’s money on the Christian belief that a recompensatory afterlife exists. If it is not true, he argued, then one has lost nothing but one’s stake. If it is true, one has gained all.

7 Now even an atheist contemporary with Pascal might have agreed that nothing but good could ensue, in an unjust society where the majority conveniently believed in hellfire, from supporting the idea, false or true, of an afterlife. But today the concept of hellfire has been discarded by the theologians, let alone the rest of us. Hell could be just only in a world where all were equally persuaded that it exists; just only in a world that allowed a total freedom of will – and therefore a total biographical and biological similarity – to every man and woman in it. We may still disagree on the extent to which man is determined in his behaviour by exterior circumstances, but that he is not partly so determined is irrefutable.

8 The idea of an afterlife has persistently haunted man because inequality has persistently tyrannized him. It is not only to the poor, the sick, the unfortunate underdogs of history, that the idea appeals; it has appealed to all honest men’s sense of justice, and very often at the same time as the use of the idea to maintain an unequal status quo in society has revolted them. Somewhere, this belief proposes, there is a system of absolute justice and a day of absolute judgement, by and on which we are all to be rewarded according to our deserts.

9 But the true longing of humanity is not for an afterlife; it is for the establishment of a justice here and now that will make an afterlife unnecessary. This myth was a compensatory fantasy, a psychological safety-valve for the frustrations of existential reality.

10 We are ourselves to establish justice in our world; and the more we allow the belief in an afterlife to dwindle away, and yet still do so little to correct the flagrant inequalities of our world, then the more danger we run.

11 Our world has a badly-designed engine. By using the oil of this myth it did not for many centuries heat up. But now the oil-level is dropping ominously low. For this reason, it is not enough to remain agnostic. We must bet on the other horse: we have one life, and it is ended by a total extinction of consciousness as well as body.

12 What matters is not our personal damnation or salvation in the world to come, but that of our fellow men in the world that is.

13 Our second hatred of death is that it almost always comes too soon. We suffer from an illusion, akin to that of the desirability of an afterlife, that we should be happier if we lived for ever. Animal desires are always for an extension of what satisfies them. Only two hundred years ago a man who reached the age of forty was exceeding the average life-span; and perhaps two hundred years from now centenarians will be as common as septuagenarians today. But they will still crave a longer life.

14 The function of death is to put tension into life; and the more we increase the length and the security of individual existence then the more tension we remove from it. All our pleasurable experiences contain a faint yet terrible element of the condemned man’s last breakfast, an echo of the intensity of feeling of the poet who knows he is going to die, of the young soldier going doomed into battle.

15 Each pleasure we feel is a pleasure less; each day a stroke on a calendar. What we will not accept is that the joy in the day and the passing of the day are inseparable. What makes our existence worthwhile is precisely that its worth and its while – its quality and duration – are as impossible to unravel as time and space in the mathematics of relativity.

16 Pleasure is a product of death; not an escape from it.

17 If it were proved that there is an afterlife, life would be irretrievably spoilt. It would be pointless; and suicide, a virtue. The only possible paradise is one in which I cannot know I did once exist.

18 There are two tendencies in the twentieth century; one, a misguided one, is to domesticate death, to pretend that death is like life; the other is to look death in the face. The tamers of death believe in life after death; they indulge in elaborate after-death ceremonial. Their attitude to death is euphemistic; it is ‘passing on’ and ‘going to a better place’. The actual process of death and decomposition is censored. Such people are in the same mental condition as the ancient Egyptians.

19 ‘Passing on’: the visual false analogy. We know that passing objects, such as we see repeatedly every day, exist both before and after the passage that we see; and so we come, illogically and wrongly, to treat life as such a passage.

20 Death is in us and outside us; beside us in every room, in every street, in every field, in every car, in every plane. Death is what we are not every moment that we are, and every moment that we are is the moment when the dice comes to rest. We are always playing Russian roulette.

21 Being dead is nothingness, not-being. When we die we constitute ‘God’. Our relics, our monuments, the memories retained by those who survive us, these still exist; do not constitute ‘God’, still constitute the process. But these relics are the fossilized traces of our having been, not our being. All the great religions try to make out that death is nothing. There is another life to come. But why only for humans? Or why only for humans and animals? Why not for inanimate things? When did it begin for humans? Before Peking man, or after?

22 As one social current has tried to hide death, to euphemize it out of existence, so another has thrust death forward as a chief element in entertainment: in the murder story, the war story, the spy story, the western. But increasingly, as our century grows old, these fictive deaths become more fictitious, and fulfil the function of concealed euphemism. The real death of a pet kitten affects a child far more deeply than the ‘deaths’ of all the television gangsters, cowboys and Red Indians.

23 By death we think characteristically of the disappearance of individuals; it does not console us to know that matter is not disappearing, but is simply being metamorphosed. We mourn the individualizing form, not the generalized content. But everything we see is a metaphor of death. Every limit, every dimension, every end of every road, is a death. Even seeing is a death, for there is a point beyond which we cannot see, and our seeing dies; wherever our capacity ends, we die.

24 Time is the flesh and blood of death; death is not a skull, a skeleton, but a clock face, a sun hurtling through a sea of thin gas. A part of you has died since you began to read this sentence.

25 Death itself dies. Every moment you live, it dies. O Death where is thy sting, Death I will be thy death. The living prove this; not the dead.

26 In all the countries living above a bare subsistence level, the twentieth century has seen a sharp increase in awareness of the pleasures of life. This is not only because of the end of belief in an afterlife, but because death is more real today, more probable, now that the H-bomb is.

27 The more absolute death seems, the more authentic life becomes.

28 All I love and know may be burnt to ashes in one small hour: London, New York, Paris, Athens gone in less time than it takes to count ten. I was born in 1926; and because of what can happen now in ten seconds, that year lies not forty-one years but a measureless epoch and innocence away. Yet I do not regret that innocence. I love life more, not less.

29 Death contains me as my skin contains me. Without it, I am not what I am. Death is not a sinister door I walk towards; it is my walking towards.

30 Because I am a man death is my wife; and now she has stripped, she is beautiful, she wants me to strip, to be her mate. This is necessity, this is love, this is being-for-another, nothing else. I cannot escape this situation, nor do I want to. She wants me to make love, not like some man-eating spider, to consume me, but like a wife in love, so that we can celebrate our total sympathy, be fertile and bear children. It is her effect on me and my effect upon her that make all that is good in my time being. She is not a prostitute or a mistress I am ashamed of or want to forget or about whom I can sometimes pretend that she does not exist. Like my real wife she informs every important situation in my life, she is wholly of my life, not beyond, or against, or opposite to it. I accept her completely, in every sense of the word, and I love and respect her for what she is to me.

HAVING ONLY THIS

31 One consequence of our new awareness of death must be, and has been, an alarming growth of both national and individual selfishness, a Gadarene rush to enjoy the pleasures of the shops and senses before they close for ever. History will no doubt decide that such a rush was indeed the most striking event of the third quarter of our century; for it has not been the economic conditions that have fostered the current desire to spend and enjoy regardless of the historical situation, but ever more nakedly seen death that has created the tomorrow-we-die economic conditions.

32 Such terms as ‘affluent society’ and ‘conspicuous consumption’ are euphemisms, in the context of our poverty-stricken and starvation-ridden world, for selfishness.

33 I was taught to swim by an instructor of the old school. He gave us two lessons. In the first we were allowed lifejackets and he showed us the movements of the breast-stroke; in the second he took away the jackets and pushed us into the deep end of the pool. That is where man is now. His first instinct is to turn back to the rail and cling to it; but somehow he has to force himself out and swim.

34 Eventual non-being is our common ground. Once humanity realizes this any but the most nearly just world becomes insufficient. To try, as some religions and political creeds still do, to persuade people that what happens in this world is fundamentally unimportant, since its injustices will all be corrected in the next in the shape of an afterlife or some political Utopia – is to be on the devil’s side. And tacitly to support this belief by remaining agnostic is little better.

35 The driver of a truck carrying high explosives drives more carefully than the driver of one loaded with bricks; and the driver of a high-explosives truck who does not believe in a life after death drives more carefully than one who does.

36 Convince a man that he has only this life and he will do what most of us do about the houses we five in. They may not be the most desirable houses we can imagine, we may wish they were larger, more beautiful, newer, older – but we accept that this is the house we have to five in now, and we do our best to make it habitable. I am not a temporary tenant, a casual lodger in my present life. It is my house, and the only one I shall ever own. I have only this.

THE MYTH OF A SOUL

37 When I was a child my Cornish grandmother told me that the pure white husks of cuttlefish I sometimes found in the jetsam along the shore were the souls of drowned sailors; and some such concrete image as this of countless centuries of folk-belief has remained in all of us, even though intellectually we know what I discovered about the cuttle-bones: that eventually they go yellow and crumble into dust.

38 Man has had to accept that his body cannot survive death. So he takes the most inaccessible and mysterious part of it, the brain, and claims that some of its functionings survive death.

39 There is no thought, no perception, no consciousness of it, no consciousness of consciousness, that cannot be traced to an electrochemical event in the brain. ‘I have an immortal and immaterial soul’ is a thought or statement; it is also a recording of the activity of certain cells by other cells.

40 A machine as complex as the human brain would also develop a self-consciousness, a conscience, and a ‘soul’. It would take pleasure in being the complex machine it was; it would grow metaphysical myths about itself. All that is is constructible and therefore destructible: not magic; not ‘super-natural’; not ‘psychic’.

41 Machines are made from ‘dead’ matter; brains are made from ‘living’ matter. But the frontier between ‘dead’ and ‘living’ is confused. One could not construct a machine as complex as the brain out of ‘dead’ matter; but part of the complexity (as proved by its actual inconstructibility) of the brain is that its machinery is made of ‘living’ matter. Our inability to construct mechanical yet fully human brains shows our scientific and technological inadequacy, not any real difference of category between the machine and the brain; between mechanical functions and supposedly ‘spiritual’ thoughts.

42 What survives death is putrescent stopped machinery. The consciousness is a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror; anything that enters this room can be endlessly reflected and its reflections reflected. But when the room is demolished, no mirrors, no reflections; nothing.

43 The myth of a separate consciousness partly arises because of the loose way we use T. T becomes an object – a third thing. We are constantly in situations where we feel ourselves inadequate and where we think either ‘It is not my fault, since I am not the person I would have chosen to be’ or ‘It is my fault’. These self-criticisms and excuses give us an illusion of objectivity, of being able to judge ourselves. We therefore devise a thing that judges, a separate ‘soul’. But this ‘soul’ is no more than the ability to observe, to remember and to compare, and to create and to store ideals of conduct. This is mechanism, not ectoplasm; the human brain, not the Holy Ghost.

44 Life is the price we pay for death, not the reverse. The worse our life, the more we pay; the better, the cheaper. Evolution is the growth of experience, of intelligence, of knowledge, and this growth engenders moments of insight, moments when we see deeper purposes, truer causes, more intended effects. We stand at this great insight now: there is no life after death. Soon this will be as certain to everyone as it is certain to me, where I write, that there is no one in the next room. It is true that I cannot absolutely prove there is no one without going into the room; but all the circumstantial evidence supports my belief. Death is the room that is always empty.

45 The great linked myths of the afterlife and the immortal soul have served their purpose; have stood between us and reality. But their going will change all, and is meant to change all.

ISOLATION

46 The old religions and philosophies were refuges, kind to man in a world that his ignorance of science and technology made unkind. Never try to pass us by, they always said, for behind us is nothing but misery and horror.

47 It is cold and bare outside, says the mother; but one day the child goes out. This age is still our first day out, and we feel ourselves alone; more free and more alone.

48 Our stereotyping societies force us to feel more alone. They stamp masks on us and isolate out real selves. We all live in two worlds: the old comfortable man-centred world of absolutes and the harsh real world of relatives. The latter, the relativity reality, terrifies us; and isolates and dwarfs us all.

49 Greater social concern may, paradoxically, only increase this isolation. The more society interferes and supervises and plays the good Samaritan, the less needed and lonelier the secret individual gets.

50 More and more we know how far we are from the persons we should like to be. Less and less do we believe that a man can be any other than he is born and conditioned to be. The more science reveals our mechanical nature the more a harried ‘free’ man, a Robin Hood in each, retreats into the forests of the private mind.

51 Yet all these lonelinesses are a part of our growing up, of our first going out alone, of our freedom. A child, is protected from such fear and loneliness by having a falsely kind and simple mirage erected around him. He grows up and goes out into loneliness and reality and there he builds a more real protection against his isolation out of love and friendship and feeling for his fellow men.

52 Once again the indifferent process of infinity seems at first sight to have trapped us into a corner. But we are trapped only by our own stupidity and weakness. The escape is clear.

THE ANXIETIES

53 Anxiety is the name we give to an unpleasant effect on us, and personal to us, of the general necessity for hazard. All anxieties are in some sense goads. They may goad the weak beyond endurance; but it is essential that humanity as a whole is goaded.

54 In a happy world all anxieties would be games. An anxiety is a lack that causes pain; a game is a lack that causes pleasure. Two different men in identical circumstances: what one may feel is an anxiety, while to the other it is a game.

55 Anxieties are tensions between a pole in our real life and a counterpole in the life we imagine we would like to lead.

56 There are esoteric metaphysical anxieties and practical daily anxieties. There are fundamental universal anxieties and special individual anxieties. The more sensitive and self-conscious and aware of others man becomes, the more anxious, in his present ill-organized world, he is going to become.

57 Anxieties:

The anxiety of the ignorance of the meaning of life.

The anxiety of not knowing the future.

The anxiety of death.

The anxiety of choosing right. Where will my choices lead? Can I choose?

The anxiety of otherness. All is other to me, including most of myself.

The anxiety of responsibility.

The anxiety of inability to love and help others: our family, our friends, our country, all men. This is aggravated by our increased other-awareness.

The anxiety of not being loved by others.

The anxieties of the respublica – social injustice, the H-bomb, starvation, racialism, brink policies, chauvinism, and the rest.

The anxiety of ambition. Am I the person I want to be? Am I the person others (my employers, my family, my friends) want me to be?

The anxieties of social position. Of class, of birth, of money, of status in society.

The anxiety of money. Have I the necessities of life? There are situations in which a private yacht and a gallery of old masters may seem necessities of life.

The anxiety of time. Have I the time to do what I want?

The anxiety of sex.

The anxiety of work. Am I doing the right work? Am I doing it as well as it needs to be done? The anxiety of health.

58 To be alone in an office – dozens of telephones all ringing at the same time. These anxieties should make us one. We all feel them. But we let them isolate us, as if the citizens of a country would defend it by each barricading himself in his own house.

HAZARD

59 My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it.

60 Hazard is essential for an evolutionary process. Some personal effects of it make us unhappy, because hazard is by definition inegalitarian. It is indifferent to law and to justice, as we understand those terms.

61 The purpose of hazard is to force us, and the rest of matter, to evolve. It is only by evolving that we, in a process that is evolving, can continue to survive. The purpose of human evolution is therefore to recognize this: that we must evolve to exist. And that we should extirpate unnecessary inequality – in other words, limit hazard in the human sphere – is an obvious corollary. There is therefore no more sense in being unhappy at hazard in general than there is in hating hands because they can be cut off; or in not taking every precaution to see that they shall not be cut off.

ENVY

62 Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poorer do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have also never been more widespread.

63 Each age has its mythical happy man: the one with wisdom, with genius, with saintliness, with beauty, with whatever is rare and the Many are not able to possess. The twentieth century’s happy man is the man with money. Since our belief in a rewarding afterlife has decayed more quickly than our capacity to create a rewarding present life has grown, there was never a fiercer determination touch the paragon.

64 We are born with cleverness, beauty and the seeds of greatness. But money is something different. We say ‘he was born rich’; but that is precisely what he was not. He may have been born into a rich family, of rich parents. One is born intelligent or beautiful, but not rich. In short, the distribution of money, unlike the distribution of intelligence, beauty and the other enviable human qualities, is remediable. It is a field in which envy can act. The human situation seems to the Many outrageous enough without this additional unstomachable outrage of vast inequality in the distribution of wealth. How dare a millionaire’s son be the son of a millionaire?

65 The three great historical rejections:

(a) the rejection of lack of political freedom;

(b) the rejection of irrational systems of social coste;

(c) the rejection of gross inequality in wealth.

The first rejection began with the French Revolution; the second is in progress; the third begins.

66 Free enterprise, as we understand it, is to allow a man to become as rich as he likes. That is not free enterprise, but free vampirism.

67 The great twentieth-century equation is that I=you. And the great twentieth-century envy is that I am less than you.

68 Like every other fact, this ubiquitous envy, this desire to equalize the wealth of the world, is a utility. Its use is obvious: it will force, is already forcing, in the form of the Cold War, the richer countries to disgorge their wealth, literal and metaphorical.

69 The flaws of a utility are the seeds of its obsolescence. There are two main flaws in this envy. The first is that it is based on the assumption that having money and being happy are synonymous. In a capitalist society they very largely are; but this is not in the nature of things. It is simply in the nature of a capitalist society; and this supposition that wealth is the only ticket to happiness, a supposition the capitalist society must encourage if it is to exist, is one that will finally enforce profound changes in such societies.

70 A capitalist society conditions its members to envy and be envied; but this conditioning is a form of movement; and the movement will be out of the capitalist society into a better one. I am not saying, as Marx did, that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction; but that it contains the seeds of its own transformation. And that it is high time it started to nurture those seeds.

71 The second flaw in this envy is that it equalizes; and all equalization tends to stagnancy. We must have the equalization, but we do not want the stagnation. This argument from stasis, that inequality is a reservoir of evolutional energy, is one of the most powerful on the side of the advocates of inequality – the rich. Total inequality in wealth, our present condition, is unsatisfactory; and comparative equality of wealth, the situation we are painfully and crotchetily moving into, is full of danger. We need some other eventual situation.*

72 What is this envy, this dreadful groping of the thin fingers of the world’s poor for the way of life and the knowledge and the wealth we have over the centuries stored up in the West? It is humanity. Humanity is this envy, this desire on the one side to hold, this desire on the other to take. As the mob screams in front of the embassy, as bitter lies foul the wavelength, as the viciously rich grow more selfish and the savagely poor more desperate, as race hates race, as thousands of isolated incidents seem to inflame this last great conflict of man against man, it may seem that this envy is a terrible thing. But I believe, and this is a situation where believing is initially more important than reasoning, that the great sane core of mankind will see this envy for what it really is: a great force to make humanity more human, a situation allowing only one solution – responsibility.

73 What we are before is like a strait, a tricky road, a passage where we need courage and reason. The courage to go on, not to try to turn back; and the reason to use reason; not fear, not jealousy, not envy, but reason. We must steer by reason, and jettison – because much must go – by reason.

74 Where we are now is where Columbus stood; and looked to sea.