America [7]

Conan the Barbarian said that barbarism was the natural state of mankind. “Civilisation is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

CS Lewis said that we were too inclined to believe that Chivalry was part of the natural order: that you would automatically expect someone who is very skilled at beheading Saracens in the crusades and awfully adept at blowing up Germans in the Somme to be very polite and humble and gentle the rest of the time. But this is untrue: we spent centuries artificially hammering into soldiers the idea that if you were merciful and honourable and magnanimous, you were not only a better person, but actually a better soldier: that it was macho to be kind. We came up with this ridiculous notion precisely to rein in the natural tendency of single men in uniforms to act like psychopaths.

Similarly, we invented the absurd idea that while nothing matters more than Sports and the whole of your national and local prestige depends on how good you are at Sportsing; nevertheless if you come second in the Sports you have to pretend that you don’t really mind. And we did it for the same reason: if sixteen rugger-buggers got cross every time they lost a match, the grounds-men at Twickenham would spend all their time clearing dead bodies off the pitch. The riot police still have to be on standby every time there is a significant soccer match.

So pick your side:

1. People are naturally good but it is possible, through lies and propaganda, to cause them to temporarily become bad.
2. People are naturally bad, but it is possible, through education and religion, to cause them to temporarily become good.
3. Some people are naturally good and some people are naturally bad and at any one time one group may have the ascendancy.
4. “Goodness” and “Badness” are meaningless terms. Your choice of Alignment is a preference for shiny armour or chaos death spiky bits and nothing else.

By all means quibble with words. You can say that by “good” I mean “the collective; the idea of sharing” and that by “evil” I mean “individuality, egotism, the idea of advancing yourself” and that I can only ask which position is better and which position is worse because I have already decided the answer.

Must barbarism always ultimately triumph? 

I see your Robert E Howard and raise you a Michael Moorcock. If everyone were what I call good then we would all sit around listening to the Incredible String Band and drinking diet coke, and nothing would ever get made, and we would all starve. But if everyone were what I call evil, then every game of football would turn into a genocidal race war, and we would all end up in the gutter eating each other’s corpses. We need to find a path down the middle: we need some sort of, I don’t know, Cosmic Balance that will keep the collective and the individual in some kind of equilibrium.

Or is Ursula K Le Guin a higher court than Michael Moorcock? Good wouldn’t be good if it didn’t contain a little dot of evil and evil wouldn’t be evil if it didn’t contain a little spot of good and the black fish and the white fish are engaged in a kind of dance and you can’t think of one without the other.

Or are we, after all, going to have to do God?

Perhaps we are not talking about good and evil, law and chaos, yin and yang or the collective and the individual. Perhaps we should be thinking in terms of the Divine Image and Original Sin. Humans aren’t good or evil but fallen; not a bad thing, but a good thing spoiled. We are neither psychotic apes nor altruistic angels: we are more like stupendous works of art on to which some bastard has daubed a great big penis.

Which still seems to me like the most plausible way forward. Humans fuck things up because they have cut themselves off from The Force; and rather than trying very, very hard to be nice they ought first to try to get back in touch with The Force whereupon they will find that the niceness comes naturally. The first part of getting back in touch with The Force is wanting to get in touch with The Force, or, in the jargon, Faith. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you.

Whether this necessarily leads to Christmas and Easter and the Vicar of Dibley we can leave for another occasion.

But that doesn’t tell me how to act in my present situation. Do the Spirituals simply preach Salvation to the Non-Spirituals? Do they live us much like a Spiritual as they can even if there isn’t any Spirit? Do they retreat into caves in the desert and wait for everyone to become as Spiritual as they are? Or do they take up arms and by opposing slaughter all the Non-Spirituals?

Different groups have at different times literally taken all four positions, and none seem intrinsically illogical.

I have a Mr Dawkins on the phone. He says that a belief in original sin inexorably and necessarily leads to crusades and pogroms, and that a belief in spirituality necessarily leads to a belief in original sin, and therefore we should drop the whole idea and become materialists.

“But if materialism is right, what are our grounds for saying that crusades and pogroms are a bad thing? Might they not conceivably be precisely what the principle of Survival of the Fittest requires?”

Er…He seems to have hung up. [1]

There is a version of Catholicism that says that Catholicism is not actually true, but that the essence of being a Catholic is behaving as if it was. (You are allowed to pretend it is true while you are talking to children and the uneducated.) Plato said that he wasn’t quite sure that it was true that human souls contained all the knowledge and truth in the universe but that we’d all have a better time if we assumed it was. Terry Pratchett thought that believing in made-up things like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy was good practice for believing in more important made-up things like Truth and Democracy. So perhaps we should pragmatically assume that my second option is correct. Human beings are, in the natural state, psychotic apes. Hatred and self-interest are what we talk about when we talk about human nature. But it is possible, through education and culture—through religion and social action—through pride flags and equality programmes—through state funded art and free school meals—through folk music and the playing of Dungeons and Dragons—very possibly through cricket and long walks in the country—maybe even through rugby, cold showers and the cane—to artificially construct a version of humanity which believes—or acts as if it believes—that being nice is a better option. And that when a powerful person dismantles those artificial structures the flood gates open and people start openly saying that we ought to just leave those Samaritan bastards to die in a pool of their own blood.

“But Andrew: if barbarian Nazism is the normal state of the human race; and liberalism was only ever the product of liberal propaganda, whence comes your right to impose liberal propaganda on the rest of the human race?”

SLARTIBARTFAST VOICE: “I know. That’s where it all breaks down, of course.”

[1] That the only part of this essay I will get any feedback on, you mark my words.

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