The Aristos

1 There remains one other, and very vital, problem that breeds dissatisfaction with the human condition. It is freedom of will.

2 We are here in another Bet Situation; that is, we are faced with a problem that we cannot and never shall solve, but about which we ought to come to some conclusion. I must bet either that I have no freedom of will and my actions are never my own, however free and willed they appear to be, or I must bet that I have, or can achieve, some sort of freedom. I can, thirdly, make no bet and remain agnostic.

3 This is in many ways an easier race to bet on than those that oppose an intervening and a non-intervening god, or an afterlife and a total extinction. Most religions and codes of justice have supposed complete freedom of will in order to make their ethical and punitive systems effective; and this is more forgive-able, if no less undemonstrable than the determinist reduction of all human behaviour to mechanics. ‘A mailman was drowned in the floods’ and ‘A mailman was murdered by a gunman’ may belong to the same category of events in evolution; but not in their significance to human society. We may say that this particular murderer had no freedom of choice when he pressed the trigger; but not that all men would have had no choice in a similar situation. We may argue about the degree of free will possessed by this or that individual; but to deny it to all mankind is to beg the great question of why we are not all gunmen – and why we are capable of disinterested choices.

4 It may turn out finally that indeed we do not, in some evolutionary or biological sense, possess any free will. All our ‘free’ choices may be finally attributable to some conditioning over which we have no control. Even if we could establish the contrary – total free w ill – W e are still limited, since to be completely free we should need an absolutely free field of choice as well as the freedom to choose in it. We are in fact confined to the courses of action available, perceivable and feasible to us. I cannot choose whether to be a woman or not because I was born male; and so on. Yet there remains the fact that we all have experience of situations when we feel (and more importantly, an outside observer can feel) we choose freely. We are perhaps, are almost certainly, machines; but we are machines so complex that they have developed a relative freedom to choose. We are in a prison cell, but it is, or can be made to become, a comparatively spacious one; and inside it we can become relatively free.

5 There may be situations and senses in which Euclidean geometry is not true; but it is enough for ordinary purposes that it seems true, and ‘works’, in ordinary situations.

6 Chess permits freedom of permutations within a framework of set rules and prescribed movements. Because a chess player cannot move absolutely as he likes, either in terms of the rules or in terms of the exigencies of the particular game, has he no freedom of move? The separate game of chess I play with existence has different rules from your and every other game; the only similarity is that each of our separate games always has rules. The gifts, inherited and acquired, that are special to me are the rules of the game; and the situation I am in at any given moment is the situation of the game. My freedom is the choice of action and the power of enactment I have within the rules and situation of the game.

7 There is finally a paradoxical sense in which we gain free will by living in society. At the most obvious level, the final decision of a committee, though it may not be the decision that some individual members would have arrived at ‘of their own free will’, does represent a freedom of general human will in the face of an apparently determining biological system. This is perhaps the deepest psychological attraction society holds for the individual; though the more easily comprehensible individual in each of us tends to think of other people’s opinions and beliefs as in some way hostile and confining, a deeper intelligence in each is aware that what springs out of this conflict is a greater general freedom – and one in which each eventually shares.

‘GRATUITOUS ACTS’

8 A famous category of actions – ‘gratuitous acts’ or sudden decisions without rational motivation – are supposed to prove absolute freedom of will. But all they prove is contempt for convention. They spring from the heresy that all restriction is analogous to imprisonment; as if everything we know, from the observable cosmos to the meson, is not restricted.

9 If I were to throw a rotten egg at the Archbishop of Canterbury I might prove that I have no respect for convention; but I prove nothing about freedom of will. A world of irrational actions would not constitute an absolutely free world because for human beings anarchy is only freedom when everyone wants anarchy.

10 In a world where the individual is, or feels that he is, being stamped out of existence it is only natural that the gratuitous act should gain a certain glamour. But this is an indictment of the world as it is, not a justification of the gratuitous act, or a proof of free will.

THE PURPOSE OF RELATIVE FREEDOM

11 If we are only relatively free, then it must be so that we shall evolve a greater relative freedom. This freedom is something that has to be gained: both by the individual in his own lifetime, and by the species during its long history.

12 It is obvious what it is gained by: greater intelligence and greater knowledge, both of self and of life. In practical social terms it requires a higher general standard of education and a different kind of education. Above all it requires social equality. Freedom of will is strictly related to freedom of living condition.

INABILITY TO ENACT GOOD

13 Since it is essential that we should fail to do evil, it is necessary that we should sometimes fail to do good. Will is an amoral force, like electricity: it can kill or it can serve. Failure to enact represents an indispensable safety system, like the fuses in an electrical system.

14 Even if we could enact more of what we willed, the world would be no better since the increased power to will and enact would apply to both good and evil actions. Therefore, to say that we wish we could enact what we will is to say that we need more training in determining what is good and what is evil; not in willing and enacting.

15 Animals have strong wills; they try to enact whatever they will. They are incapable of not acting as they will. That is how we trap them. Weak-willedness both oils and safeguards the machine of human society.

16 But our dissatisfaction is that we are unable to enact the good we freely will. I have a shilling in my pocket for this charity box; yet I pass it by. There are six principle causes of such failure.

17 The first stems from the fatalist belief that we have no freedom of choice in willing an action; and therefore we enact, if we enact, what is chosen for us. Our choosing is an illusion; our action, a waste of energy. To do or not to do… who cares?

18 The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.

19 All forks dream of crossroads; in atoms as in men, complexification causes loss of energy. Throughout history the intelligentsia have been despised for their weakness as enactors. But it would be only in a world where high intelligence were synonymous with high morality that one could wish the most intelligent to have the most power.

20 The third cause of failure to enact good stems from our ability to imagine fulfilment. We know from experience that things rarely turn out as pleasantly as we imagined they might have done; and an imagined ideal consequence may take such a hold on our minds that it becomes impossible to risk the disappointments of reality.

21 Before I act it is as if I had acted before. To say you believe in doing something may be, except in front of witnesses likely to hold you to your word, merely to give yourself an excuse not to do it. For goodness is action; not intention to act.

22 Before it is performed every action requiring a conscious effort of will (that is, which is not obligatory or instinctive) is to the imagination like a sleeping princess. It lies at the heart of an enchanted forest of potentialities. The actual performance then threatens to destroy all that might have been created by other actions; and there is a close parallel with the sexual situation. It is more pleasurable to prolong the time before ejaculation. It is nice to be mean today because I shall be generous tomorrow.

23 The fourth cause of failure to enact good stems from the desire to prove to ourselves by not acting that we can choose to act. Not to act is to act. I am what I do not do, as well as what I do. The refusal to act is often equivalent to the gratuitous act. Its fundamental motive is to prove I am free.

24 The fifth cause of failure to enact is that the action contemplated is so small in relation to the final intention that it seems pointless. It is between these tiny stools – moving the Sahara grain by grain, spooning out the Atlantic – that so many good causes vanish into thin air.

25 The sixth cause of failure to enact applies to those actions that are against something. Here the mechanism of countersupporting may prevent action.

COUNTERSUPPORTING

26 If I am attracted strongly towards a moral or aesthetic or politico-social pole, I shall hate and may wish to suppress its counterpole. But I shall also know that the pole under whose positive influence I live is dependent for much of its energy on that counterpole; furthermore, I derive pleasure from being attracted. My opposition to the counterpole will in this case frequently be of a peculiar kind. I call this kind of opposition countersupporting.

27 I may offer violent physical opposition to some idea or social tendency. But violence breeds violence; strength breeds strength; resource breeds resource. Violent persecution often conceals a desire that enough of the persecuted shall survive for the exercise of more violence. Fox hunters preserve foxes. The keenest shots preserve game most keenly.

28 Violence strengthens the opposed; passion tempers it. To argue passionately against something is to give it passion.

29 Games were invented as a kind of perpetuum mobile, an eternal receptacle for human energy. All the great games: animal baiting, hunting, fishing, ball games, chess, cards, dice, all admit of endless permutations.

A great game is an unfailing well; and it is precisely this inexhaustibility that the countersupporter seeks in the enemy. The Anglo-Saxon ethic of sportsmanship and fair play, which developed out of amour courtois notions of chivalry, enshrines very clearly the principle of countersupporting.*

30 Purely emotive opposition is a boomerang – it will always return home, and not simply to roost. Any opposition that can be picked up and used by the enemy in return is not opposition, but counter-support.

31 The most current way of countersupporting is by masked toleration. It is a general innate weakness of high intelligence. I show actionless hostility towards a counterpole; it is generally one of so vast and general a nature that it seems that however active I might be I could have no effect on the situation as a whole.

32 The masked tolerator knows that the thing he opposes is essential to his well-being. He may, indeed usually does, enjoy expressing his opposition verbally, but he rarely makes any constructive opposing action. Very often he will despise the active workers of the cause that publicly fight what he opposes. He will say that such people are pursuing private ends – they like the excitement of action, they are born extroverts – and that he himself sees too deep, too far. He knows the vanity, or futility, or illusoriness, of active opposition. This is the most felt, most shared, most enjoyed despair of our age.

33 The artistic figures considered most significant in and of our century are those that best express this conscious sense of fact of intellectual will-lessness and inadequacy – the fallen saint, the weak man; and those that express the potent contrary – the men of action, the doers. Think of the Wild Western hero; the characters in Beckett and Greene, Hemingway and Malraux.

34 The Don Quixotes of our modern La Mancha are those duped by the myth that to oppose must mean to wish to destroy; and that to be unable to destroy is a tragic situation.

35 There are two motives in all opposition; and the two motives are antipathetic. One is rightly or wrongly the will to suppress all opposition, the other is rightly or wrongly the will to prolong it. It is necessary to determine before opposing what part these two wills play.

36 There are more kinds of hypocrisy than the conscious ones. All opposition points to the opposed. Look how attractive Christianity has made sin. The best opposition is always scientific, logical, rational. The more unanswerable in reason it is, the better it is.

37 The psychiatric patient is not cured, but made less abnormal, by understanding the contradictions of his own nature. Dimly he begins to see how the forces that use him can be used. To understand is not only to forgive; it is to control.

38 Before opposing, ask these questions:

To what extent do I enjoy opposing? If I could annihilate in one blow all that I oppose, would I make that blow?

Will my opposition weaken or strengthen the thing opposed?

How effective is my proposed form of opposition likely to be?

Is it a pose or a reality?

To what extent is it caused purely by a desire to be admired, or not despised, by those I admire?

Is there anything else I could oppose more usefully?

39 My opposition is ‘my duty’; if I once admitted that my opposition was really my pleasure…

40 Tears wept on enemy graves are often peculiarly sincere; we weep our own now homeless energy.

41 So many movements of opposition are Charges of the Light Brigade. And, symptomatically, we admire their failure more than we hate their waste and futility.

GOOD EQUALS EVIL

42 There is one last desperate argument sometimes advanced against doing good actions. It is this: all actions, whether intended to be good or bad, interweave so extensively as time passes that finally their relative goodness or badness completely disappears. Both evil and good die; or are metamorphosed.

43 We all know evils to some can cause good to others; but to leap from what may be true of the whole, or true of any given action viewed historically, to the theory that the individual can be excused any moral concern about his actions is to fall into the fallacy that what is true of an action must be true of the enactor. A man must finally do good for his own and his society’s health; not for good’s sake or the action s sake.

44 If good finally becomes lost in evil, and evil in good, then it is to ensure the survival of matter; not of humanity.

45 All our judgements of right and wrong are absolutely and evolutionally meaningless. But we are like a judge who is compelled to judge. Our function is to judge, to choose between good and evil. If we refuse to do so, we cease to be human beings and revert to our basic state, of being matter; and even at his very worst the very worst among us is still something more than a few score kilograms of complaisant molecules.

WHY SO LITTLE GOOD?

46 Yet even given these reasons, given that failure to enact good must often arise from the difficulty of knowing which of several possible courses is the best or from a genuine inability to see any necessity for action (the ancient heresy of quietism), we are all aware that we do not do all the good we could. However stupid we are, there are simple situations in which we can see a clearly good course of action, and yet shirk it; however selfish we are, there are good courses that involve no self-sacrifice, and yet we shirk them.

47 For the last two and a half millennia almost every great thinker, every great saint, every great artist has advocated, personified and celebrated – or at least implied – the nobility and excellence of the good act as the basis of the just society. On their evidence its social and biological value cannot be in doubt. So it almost seems as if the great humans are wrong, as if in the commoner bulk of mankind there was some apprehension of a perverse but deeper truth: it is better generally to do nothing than generally to do good.

48 I believe this strange and irrational apathy is largely due to the religion-engendered myths that doing good will bring us pleasure – if there is an after-life, eternal pleasure – and that thus the good man is happier than the bad. The world around us is full of evidence that these are indeed myths: good men are very often far less happy than bad ones, and good actions very often bring nothing but pain. Just as he is an eternal seeker of the agent, man is an eternal seeker of the reward. He feels there ought to be some further recompense – something more than a clear conscience and a feeling of self-righteousness – for doing good. The conclusion is irresistible: doing good must bring (and therefore before the doing, promise) pleasure. If it does not, then it is a bad bargain.

49 There are two obvious ‘modes’ of pleasure. One we may call intended in that the event which brings pleasure, the meeting with a lover, the visit to a concert, is planned and intended. The second and much more important kind is fortuitous, in that it comes unexpectedly – not only the surprise meeting with an old friend, the sudden beauty of some usually banal landscape, but all those elements in the active intention to have pleasure that were not clearly foreseen. In fact, when we plan an intended pleasure we always unconsciously assume that there will be a free bonus of the fortuitous kind. Our approach is that of the traveller: to the extent that his journey is planned and has definite aims he will get the pleasure intended, but he will also expect a very large content of the fortuitous kind, both in what he intended to happen to him and in what will happen to him by chance. In this way we hedge our bets – if the planned pleasures disappoint, there are the unexpected ones, and vice versa.

50 What is immediately striking about both these modes of pleasure is that they depend very largely on hazard.

A girl may have long planned to marry. But when the wedding is finally present, is taking place, there is a sense of good luck. Nothing has happened, although many things could have happened, to prevent it. Perhaps she may look back then to the chance first encounter with the man who is now her husband; and the basic element of hazard there is overwhelming. In short, we are conditioned to see pleasure of both kinds as very largely a result of hazard. We do not arrive at it so much as it arrives at us.

51 But as soon as we treat pleasure as a kind of successful bet, and then expect this sort of pleasure from moral choices and actions, we are in trouble. The atmosphere of chance that pervades the one world will contaminate the other. Hazard rules the laws of pleasure – so let it, we say, rule the laws of doing good. Worse than that we shall come to the obvious conclusion that only good actions that promise pleasure are worth our doing. The pleasure may come from community esteem, from personal gratitude, from self-interest (the hope of good in return); from hopes of a pleasant afterlife; from being freed of the sense of guilt, if such a sense has been ‘built in’ by the cultural environment. But in each case the incentive, however necessary historically or justifiable on pragmatic grounds, creates a totally wrong climate around our intention to act well.

52 Doing good for some public reward is not doing good: it is doing something for public reward. That it also does good may seem to be its justification; but it is a dangerous justification, as I shall show.

53 There is a third less obvious ‘mode’ of pleasure to which we do not usually attach the idea, though we have the sensation, of pleasure. We may call it functional, and it is the pleasure we get from all those activities essential to our being – eating, excreting, breathing, and ultimately, existing. In a sense these are the only pleasures we cannot deny having. If we do not distinguish them very clearly it is because they are overlaid by the other two much more conscious and complex modes. If I choose what I eat, I experience the intended pleasure; if I enjoy what I eat more than I expected, I experience the fortuitous; but buried beneath is the functional pleasure of eating because to eat is to continue to exist. To use Jungian terminology, this third mode is archetypal, and I believe that from it we ought to derive our motive for doing good. In terms of bodily functions, we should evacuate good – not ejaculate it.

54 We never have a surfeit of natural bodily functions. We expect no extrinsic reward for carrying them out, since we know that the reward lies in the performance. Non-performance means illness or death, just as the non-performance of good actions finally means the death of society. Charity, kindness to others, actions against injustice and inequality should be acts of hygiene, not of pleasure.

55 What then does the functional ‘health’ thus brought about consist of? Its most important element is this: that the good action (and from ‘good action’ I am here excluding all those actions whose real motive is public esteem) is the most convincing proof we shall ever have that we do possess a relative freedom of will. Even when it does not involve acting against our self-interest, the good action requires a lack of self-interest, or conversely, an output of unnecessary (in terms of our biological needs) energy. It is an act against inertia, against what would have been otherwise determined by inertia and natural process. In a sense it is a divine act, in the old sense of divine: that is, the intervention of a free will upon matter imprisoned in its mere matterness.

56 All our concepts of God are concepts of our own potentialities. The charity and compassion that have been universally attributed to the finest – under their different outward masks – of such God-concepts are the qualities we are striving to establish in ourselves. They have nothing to do with any external ‘absolute’ reality; they are reflections of our hopes.

57 We cannot in ordinary life easily separate self-interested motives from the ‘hygienic’ one I propose. But the hygienic motive can always be used to assess the others. It constitutes a check upon them, and especially in that sadly wide category where the action seems good in the enactor’s mind but is clearly evil in its effects. There were certainly members of the Inquisition, there were Protestant witch-burners, there were perhaps even Nazi race-exterminators who genuinely and disinterestedly believed in the goodness of what they were doing. But even if one gives them every benefit of every doubt, they were all impelled by spurious rewards for their ‘good’ actions. They hoped for a better world to come for themselves and their co-believers, not for the heretics, witches and Jews they destroyed. They acted not for greater freedom, but for greater pleasure.

58 Freedom of will in a world without freedom is like a fish in a world without water. It cannot exist because it cannot use itself. The greatest fallacy of political tyranny has always been that the tyrant is free while his subjects are enslaved; but he is enslaved by his own enslaving, tyrannized by his own tyranny. He is not free to act as he wishes because what he wishes is determined, and generally very narrowly, by the demands of maintaining tyranny. And this political truth is true on a personal level. If the intention of a good action is not finally to institute more freedom (therefore, more justice and equality) for all, it will be partly evil not only to the object of the action but to the enactor, since its evil aspects will limit his own freedom. In terms of functional pleasure, it will be similar to unexcreted food, whose nutritional goodness is progressively counteracted by the damage it will do if its harmful elements are not passed out of the organism.

59 Over the last two hundred years there has been a great improvement in personal and public hygiene and cleanliness; and this was largely brought about by persuading people that the results of being dirty and apathetic in the face of disease were not acts of God, but preventable acts of nature; not the sheer misery in things, but the controllable mechanisms of life.

60 We have had the first, the physical, phase of the hygienic revolution; it is time we went to the barricades for the second, the mental. Not doing good when you usefully could is not immoral; it is going about with excrement on the hands.