The Gift of Fire, Richard Mitchell [best e books to read txt] 📗

You have just said, have you not, that anyone who would condemn the violent tactics of a few individuals would first have to pass a test, a test that would require some prior condemnation of other violent tactics?

Well, yes, that is what I have said.

Did you also intend to give the impression that you yourself had already passed that test, that you were indeed ready to condemn what you describe as the greater evil? Or are you disqualifying yourself as one who would condemn the lesser because you have not condemned the greater?

I must admit, nay, affirm, that I have condemned the greater evil, and I can hardly imagine how Reason might demonstrate me wrong in doing that.

So you have passed the test. Why don’t you just go ahead and condemn that “lesser evil”?

What can I say to that, except to admit that I hadn’t been making sense. So my questioner would want to consider further the possibility that I had been irrational not by oversight, but because certain voices in me were shouting.

In itself the irrationality was quite outrageous, but all the more so because it was committed in what seemed a studied pretense of rationality. It was worded as though it were logic. You ask me if I can say Y? Well, no one can say Y without having said X. I do, of course, say X, but I will still not say Y, thus suggesting that saying Y is not enough to bring me to say X, and revealing that something else must be necessary for the saying of X, and that the relationship between X and Y is not quite as direct and “logical” as I have implied. But it did sound logical, didn’t it? What was the need of such pretense? What factions required it?

Orwell provided us a memorable understanding in saying that the strange language of government grew out of the need of government continually to “defend the indefensible.” That makes us comfortable, because “government” is somebody else, and we think ourselves unindicted by Orwell’s fine phrase. But I too am government. Whatever nonsense I may talk comes straight from my throne. It is an enunciation of nothing less than “policy,” some internal principle by which I work, and which dictates not only my deeds, but my thoughts and my words, which are also deeds.

My counselor would surely ask me just who is making the policy in this little kingdom. Is it one certain brand of Irishness, perhaps? Can it be Catholicism? Is it some homegrown version of the one or the other, some private misunderstanding of special ethnic or religious beliefs, traditions and customs? Is it perhaps much simpler? Some desire to make friends and influence people, or some fear of offending certain people? Surely, in a mind that can take the grasp of itself, such an astonishing, and apparently deliberate, crime against your own mind must rise from somewhere deep in the belly, from the demanding voices of those who do not quietly ask and answer in turn, but shout, and will neither ask nor answer, but only proclaim.

The World of No One At All

Fears shout even louder than appetites. In one way, it is good for us that fear blots out thought and turns us into its robots. In emergencies, nothing is more useful than utterly unthinking fear, which turns on automatic and instantaneous responses, and the person in whom acute fear does not have that effect will not last long on the roads. But fear does not limit itself to immediate physical emergencies, and imagination easily provides it nourishment by picturing an endless anthology of all the bad things that can happen to us, as well as those that surely will happen to us. Even in quiet reflection, fear scrambles thought.

So it is that we are inclined to reject as simply preposterous a notion of Epictetus which holds that nothing bad can happen to a good person. We have plenty of evidence to the contrary, ranging from flat tires and toothaches at one end of the scale to death and destruction at the other.

Toothaches and flat tires some of us may actually escape, but not death and destruction. Death and destruction, however, which are the natural destinies of all creatures and things, are not the killers and destroyers, and it is a strange understanding of the world by which we think the former as “bad” as the latter. Stranger still, we actually take comfort from believing that, since we are regularly victims of what we call bad, then we must be the good, and the innocent. To be stricken with a lethal disease, therefore, is to be persecuted by an implacable and irresistible tyrant, and the sufferer wins not only sympathy, but moral approbation, as the aggrieved party in an unfair proceeding. He seems, all guiltless, to have been condemned. Therefore, he must be the just party to this transaction. That a “bad thing” has happened to him, proves him one of the “good people.” It is as though sickness and every other condition of suffering were a vast prison, in which every single prisoner has been given a bum rap, unjustly accused, unlawfully convicted, and sentenced to death.

In what passes for an age of pragmatic materialism, that is a remarkably superstitious view of the natural world. There is no “progress” in the mind that moves from the belief that the trees and rivers have certain intentions, to the belief that viruses and molecules have intentions. Nor is that mind any the better for admitting, as most will, that it “knows,” of course, that a virus has no intention, but that it nevertheless still feels as though that were so. That’s what the belly says.

Epictetus was doing no more than reaffirming, simply and literally, a very old idea. He could see no sense at all in presuming the existence of goodness or badness where there was no intention, no will. He knew that people fell sick and died, and that they maimed and killed each other routinely, either in the name of the Law or out of it. He was not a childish dreamer who imagined that the “good,” if only they believed something or other with all their hearts, would somehow be magically protected from the natural processes in the world and in themselves. He knew, and anyone can, through nothing more than a little reflection, that it comes to pass with the good exactly as it comes to pass with the bad. Chance and the world happen to them all. And it is the same, whether we imagine that the world includes inordinately touchy gods who take revenge for affront, or implacable diseases lying in wait for those who don’t eat enough fiber.

But I suspect that for Epictetus the question was not how to escape the gods or the diseases; it was rather, how to remain a good person when stricken by either, as we all must be in one way or another. To be sick, or to suffer, is inevitable; but to become bitter and vindictive in sickness and suffering, and to surrender to irrationality, supposing yourself the innocent and virtuous victim of the evil intentions of the world, is not inevitable. The appropriate answer to the question, Why me? is the other question, Why not me? Those who can ask the first, must have already devised some answer to the second, however unconsciously and incoherently. It is the most important implication of Epictetus’ strange assertion that a good person would know better than to devise that answer, an answer that would have to be irrational, setting the deviser above or beyond the natural order in which life takes place.

The curious proposition of Epictetus can be easily understood in the simplest of examples. I find myself once again in the tollbooth line, the shortest one, into which I have audaciously and cunningly found my way, and actually escaped, this time, serious injury or even death, while also, this time, failing to visit either on other drivers. I am, of course, going somewhere. My mission, unlike that of the woman ahead of me, is important. Much, much will depend on my timely arrival at my important destination, where those who await me will be able to do nothing, nothing at all, without me. I have already asked the usual question, Why me? Now I am busy trying to provide a convincing answer to the neat question, Why not me? I have made and accepted my own version of the natural order of things, and actually supposed a universe that has, or damn well ought to have, my convenience in mind. And there she sits, pawing, all in vain, through eighteen pounds of purse. Harm is being done. Notice that I have cleverly put this in the passive, a traditional and convenient way of suggesting that there can be a deed without a doer, and harm without a harmer.

But harm, real harm, truly is done; a badness has been brought into being. And there is an agent of harm; a person who could choose either to do it or not, has done it. I am the agent. There is no other possible agent in sight. The changeless woman is, in this case, as utterly without intentions as the rain that might fall before I reach that stupendously important destination. Should that happen, will I blame the rain, and fume at the Great Order of Things, which is obviously against me? In this context, of course, such a reaction seems preposterous, even ludicrous, in fact, hardly to be believed. But an honest inventory of the past compels me to notice that I have, quite contrary to what seems just now nothing but simple good sense, occasionally done such a thing. Others have, too, I think. How strange.

The event, perhaps, is trivial; the condition it brings is not. It is supremely important. It is a temporary destruction of a person, and, for all I know, a harbinger of a permanent destruction, a lifelong absence of self-rule. (Can such a condition be possible?) If I fail to take it seriously because of the supposed triviality of the event, which I have already taken seriously enough to bring about my own derangement, Epictetus will surely ask me how I intend to measure events, so that I will know which are worth the effort of self-rule, and which may be shrugged off as no big deal. He will also ask me exactly how I intend to instruct Petronilla in this matter, so that she too, like me, will be perfectly capable of thoughtful self-government in the great matters but practical enough not to waste her mental energies on the small. My answers would be, well, certainly entertaining, provided, of course that I made any at all, which would depend on whether I judged the questions themselves a great matter or no big deal. If I am truly to answer Epictetus, and not simply to declaim against him, I can answer only in Reason, only in reasonable conversation, in rationally measurable sayings, in quietly asking and answering in turn.

There is no secret in the art of distinguishing between the better and the worse. The consideration of the questions of goodness and badness is no more mysterious than the consideration of the square of the hypotenuse. Talking about Goodness, the crime that Socrates promised to commit every day, requires no faculty that you and I do not possess by Nature. It requires no special knowledge that only a special few can claim, and no official licensing. It depends not at all on the authority of others, who are all nothing more, or less, than other parties to the conversation, and all of whose sayings are subject to the same rational testing as ours, and whose worth is not in the mouth