That which we find words for is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Nowadays, one cannot write like Shakespeare. There is no reason why one cannot write as well as Shakespeare (with immense luck and super-Herculean effort), but to write in a style remotely comparable to Shakespeare’s would be considered hopelessly old-fashioned. In itself, there is nothing odd in this, for the least we expect of artists is that they create something new.

But let us think about this a little more. When we say, “to write in a style remotely comparable to Shakespeare’s”, what do we mean? This is by no means self-evident. We do not mean using words that are now antiquated, such as “thee” and “thou”, or including fools in our tragedies, or even having characters that utter soliloquies. We don’t even mean those things that are completely unique to Shakespeare, such as his particular mode of characterisation. We do mean, for instance, his use of blank verse. Blank verse is not unique to the bard, of course, but if it were employed in a modern play, this use would very likely be self-conscious, almost a unique selling point, and not something arising out of artistic necessity. Some modern plays do use verse, such as Michael Frayn’s Afterlife, but these are rare exceptions and are seen as oddities. The point here is that a culture that values verse so highly that it is commonplace to use it in plays is one whose values are simply different to one which does not.

The fact that Shakespeare’s style, and Shakespeare in general, was more acceptable in his time than ours[1] suggests a difference in the characteristics of the age. It is partly that certain ideas naturally occurred to Shakespeare in the first place that may not have otherwise occurred to him, but also it is that the audiences and theatre managers and queens and kings of his day were more open to those sorts of ideas.

We often assume that great works of art can appear in any age. On further reflection, however, this is far from a safe assumption. Take the Rococo. Not only did it not produce a painting of comparable quality to the best of the High Renaissance, but I would argue that it could not do so. Sure, this seems an impossible counterfactual, but the deeper point is that some periods may just have more of the cultural factors that are conducive to great art than others. The period of the medieval mystery and morality plays was dramatically poor in comparison with the period of the great Attic drama. The plays of the former period had very specific religious and moral aims, and these were necessarily confining. The culture of Athens in the latter period also had considerably more confidence in itself—it was not in the shadows of great overwhelming ideas of the past, it was an originator of those great ideas.

In any age, the artist is in a curious position, and his art’s development is comparable to the development of a person in general; his cultural inheritance is comparable to genetic inheritance. Each new generation feels the need to define itself, and partly it must do so in opposition to its parents; but it cannot separate itself entirely from its parents. Maturity seems to be, in part, a balance between the impulse to individuation and the need to belong, and one of the most effective ways to feel this belonging is to consider oneself part of a tradition.

This inseparability from the tradition that precedes the artist is, I think, the heart of the problem. For how are the ideas and sentiments that reach us all from civilization’s dawn substantially different than the genes that reach us from the dawn of man? If genes are unavoidable limiting factors, so that no amount of effort will make me the fastest man in the world, then why are those “cultural genes” not also limiting? You may protest that an individual can simply adopt an idea and that’s that—after all, there will be no biological reaction to it. But this is not true on a societal level: we constantly hear about society not “being ready” for a particular idea or work of art. Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge was largely dismissed by contemporary critics, one of whom called it “incomprehensible, like Chinese”. Nowadays, even if it is still difficult, it is much admired and loved by many classical composers.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” said Theodor Adorno in “Cultural criticism and society”, arguing that the same values that produced the Nazis also produced poetry, so that to engage in poetry was to deny its causal link to barbarity. Though he later softened his stance, it is a harsh embodiment of a view generally held, namely that art does not exist in a vacuum, and that it must bear some relation with the time. Indeed, it could not but strike us as odd—worse than odd—for someone to write a Wordsworthian ode to a tulip immediately after the Second World War. If an artist should transcend their experience, they should not avoid it altogether.

But this view has surely been taken to an extreme. One needs only look at contemporary British theatre. “Like our predecessors at the Royal Court in the late 1950s,” writes David Edgar (a playwright) in the New Statesman, “those of us who started out in the 1970s thought theatre’s main business should be presenting new plays about public subjects set in the modern-day world. We’re a lot closer to achieving that ambition now.” Setting aside the almost conspiratorial, world-dominational tone here, what strikes one is the combination of arrogance and vacuity—theatre’s main business! Expansion of the mind and heart be damned, for playwrights must only be concerned with Afghanistan and unemployment.

I mentioned above that movements are in part a genuine rebellion or reaction against what went before, but never a complete overturning, since one needs to feel themselves part of a tradition. This rebellion, as it is a manifestation of the instinct to individuation, very often approximates some real and eternal aspect of human nature. If Romanticism was partly a return to nature and a rebellion against Classicism and pure reason, there is nothing about this that is obviously unique to the 19^th century. That is to say, it was not invented then, and it did not end with the end of Romanticism. To be sure, a conformist of any age will find the ideas of other ages alien, but equally it does not take a genius to have some Romantic element in you now—nor did it take a genius in the millennia before Romanticism.

An artistic movement is only a rediscovery of a suppressed aspect of ourselves, an aspect which was not created by man, nor ended by him. At all times, we have had and will have elements of Classicism, Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism— what you will—within us. Movements in art, then, have both the virtue of freeing one aspect of ourselves and the vice of locking away another.

But once a new movement locks away a part of ourselves expressed in the prior movement, is it then locked away forever? My answer to that is not borne of reason, but of pure optimism. If the resurgence of classical ideas in the Renaissance shows us anything, it is that ideas that are thousands of years old are not dead. As they stand, perhaps, nothing much can be added to them. But if one seed of brilliance is taken from them, and this seed is sown in some new way, we will be furnished with something genuinely new—and who can complain of the Renaissance that it wasn’t new at the time?

Truly timeless art captures the human spirit, which is of no time but for all time; truly timeless art will be considered great no matter what the situation of society. Some people criticise Mozart for being too “sugary”. That judgement is a question of taste, and not one to be dismissed out of hand. But the real test of it is if someone can come out of Auschwitz and, when they are ready to experience art again, they can hear Mozart and not think, “this is too sugary” but instead think that its sweetness embodies life and humanity, the very things the Nazis tried to take away from him and did not succeed in taking. It is only a theoretical, top-down understanding of art that could say that poetry has suddenly become barbaric—though it is completely understandable that poets should try to find new forms for the extreme barbarity they had witnessed.

Which brings me back to Nietzsche’s words at the beginning of this essay. Culture at large appears to adopt an apparently paradoxical view of art. On the one hand, we constantly read old novels and poems, listen to old music, and so on, under the correct impression that there is still much to be gained from them—in other words, that they find words for what is not dead in our hearts. Yet we must also think that they express what is dead in our hearts, because we tend to think that what is formally new is most likely to be true, and that adopting elements of an older style, even if done conscientiously and with originality, is stale, traditional, and valueless, that it is mere repetition. Where, then, does this leave the artist who concludes that his age is artistically weak, who sees that the only way forward must be a step backward? This need not be a defeatist position. After all, when Beethoven wrote the Grosse Fuge, “intellectual” forms like fugues were out of fashion. Beethoven did not “just” write a fugue in an academic way. He used it as a stepping stone.

But it must be confessed that the nature of moral objectivity, if it is not just an illusion, is very different from the fact of Newton’s laws or of 2 and 2 equalling 4. I would instead argue for what I call an evolutionary moral pragmatism, which aims to render the metaethical question of objectivity and subjectivity irrelevant, and strives rather to find the objectively best morality under certain conditions and based on certain premisses which are taken to be reasonable and easily agreed upon, in the same way that the objectively best medical operation is one which most effectively cures the given ailment, regardless of one’s eccentric taste for a different kind of success.  There is nothing in medicine that can impel a doctor to undertake an operation correctly other than the possibility of losing his job, an outcome which medicine itself cannot render undesirable.

If humankind is looked upon merely as a species, subject just like any other to certain immutable natural laws, then it is quite clear that its intelligence places it in a category of one. If we define intelligence as being the ability to transcend our instincts, then we are probably the only animals that possess intelligence. For those animals without such intelligence, it is reasonable to assert that to write out a moral system that maximises their ability to survive would be comparatively easy. It would simply consist of taking into account their other instincts and their physical attributes, and then algorithmically working out an answer. We need not take any moral preconceptions into such an endeavour, because our aim is little more than the selfish aim of all genes. So it is possible to have a species in which the males randomly kill their young, so long as there are other factors which make this not a dominant feature of their lives; and this killing would still not be considered “bad”, because it does not seriously jeopardize survival. It is possible to have a species in which rape is commonplace, indeed in which consensual sex is nonexistent, and such species do happen to exist (for instance, bottlenose dolphins and diving beetles). Again, such rape would not be “bad”, because its effect on the species’ ability to survive is negligible. For a species without the ability to think outside of the inherited framework of moral instincts, we need only prescribe a strong set of instincts, and nothing more is required. For the sake of my argument, an act is “good” if it implicitly works towards the survival of the species involves, and “bad” if it does not.

So far, so uncontroversial. But the development of intelligence is clearly a complicating factor, and bars us from a simple algorithmic calculation of morality. With intelligence comes culture, where culture is understood to be the environment in which intelligent beings cohabitate, along with the concomitant social norms, ethical or otherwise. This environment necessarily must at some point create rules, whether implicit or explicit, regarding behaviour, since intelligence almost necessitates that someone will one day make a convincing argument for killing. These laws thus, in the first instance, attempt to guarantee against the society’s self-destructiveness. The destruction of a neighbouring tribe is of no concern unless it affects the first tribe’s chances of internal peace.

I noted that society’s rules that are appended onto our most basic instincts can be both implicit and explicit. The explicit rules are obvious: these are simply the law of the land. The implicit rules are effectively the society’s culture, and its system of understandings or norms. These are perhaps more difficult to fully understand, or at least to comprehend the full consequences thereof. But they are the most relevant here, since law has no necessary connection to morality, and morality, among intelligent beings, is the same thing as the system of norms.

What is the significance of these implicit rules? I started with the definition that the best morality is the one that best promotes the survival of the species (though cultural norms apply more to society than to the whole species). It is perhaps not obvious that implicit rules have anything of value to say about a society’s chances of survival. After all, this set of rules need not be so sophisticated if it is to merely guarantee survival—all it needs is to be intolerant of murder and other acts that are obviously detrimental to survival, and the survival is, it seems, as guaranteed as can be against all predictable disasters. This set of implicit rules need not have anything to say, for instance, about rape, since if it does not physically harm the victim it cannot affect survival.

But it is possible to argue that in an indirect sense, some acts having nothing to do with binary life and death actually do affect the society’s survival chances in the long term. To assess the survival effects of a particular act on a society, one needs to think about what the long term consequences of accepting or not accepting that act would be. This often requires considering the initial motivation behind the act. In a previous post, I discussed the question of rape, and concluded that, although varied, it is generally an expression of the libido. However, it is an unhealthy expression of the libido, unlike consensual sex and acts of sublimation, like the creation of great art, invention, and (possibly) the practice of philosophy. Given that it is an unhealthy expression of the libido, and thus results in fewer positively productive men, society as a whole will lose out. Society’s consequent stagnation will render it more vulnerable when faced with other, stronger societies.

The above might be seen as a sort of sociological plea for what is now a commonsensical view: that we should express our energies positively and foster a healthy attitude to sex. Another view that is generally accepted now (and possibly throughout history, though it didn’t seem to find much expression in the period between classical Athens and the seventeenth century), is that all individuals have the right to be free. Perhaps this is necessarily a modern idea, because it requires a certain maturity of statehood to revert to our natural state[1]. But the question of its inherent rightness is irrelevant, since we are only judging to be good those things that aid the survival of the species. It is quite clear, then, that freedom is better than bondage, and that more freedom is better than less. This works both politically and economically. A curbing of freedoms is likely to lead eventually to frustration, revolt, unrest, instability, and social weakness; whereas the granting of freedom allows the existence of an intellectually flexible society able both to change more easily and withstand pernicious ideas more efficiently. Greater freedom also creates faster-moving economies better able to generate wealth and thus stronger against outside forces that might work to destroy the society.

None of the above deals with the question of is and ought, but it does shift the parameters slightly. Perhaps one can never go from an is to an ought in a strictly logical sense, and ultimately one cannot invent an argument so rigorous that a would-be murderer would be convinced not to proceed. Samuel Johnson, in Adventurer #137, imagines a moralist who publishes a book giving such an argument. But “let us look again,” he says, “upon mankind: interest is still the ruling motive, and the world is yet full of fraud and corruption, malevolence and rapine”.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned at the beginning, one need only grant a few premisses to see that an objective morality is possible in principle—it is the one that is objectively best for the survival of humanity.

The argument can be expressed as follows:

(1).  Our deepest instincts are rooted in the survival of the species.

(2).  Intelligence in a species is potentially self-destructive, as it makes a “mathematically perfect” system of moral instincts impossible or near-impossible.

(3).  Societies evolve cultures which foster certain understandings and instincts with the (implicit) aim of countering the potentially self-destructive consequences of intelligence.

(a).  A “negative” culture is one whose culture implicitly promotes little more than the society’s survival.

(b). A “positive” culture is one which seeks implicitly to thrive. These are more inured than negative ones against potentially damaging factors.

(4).  The survival of humanity is a thing to be desired, at least from humanity’s point of view.

(5).  It follows that we should, as far as is reasonably possible, foster a positive culture in which those instincts that promote society’s thriving and survival are vigorously encouraged.

The above argument is certainly not watertight. It does not prove that the survival of society is a thing to be desired, and the argument does not really work without it. Nor does it go to great lengths to show that a “positive” culture really is better than a “negative” one at surviving damaging influences. But it may provide a basis for a potential objective morality.

It is difficult, even for those of us with limited attention spans, to bring ourselves apart from the developments in Egypt and the region at large. Nearly all of us are impressed with a great and palpable sense that history is moving in seismic shifts even as we watch. This sense is compounded by the speculation we all indulged in, a little more than a week ago, as to whether other countries in the Middle East would follow Tunisia’s example. To be sure, the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, as well as the subsequent toppling of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was more likely than most things to set off such massive demonstrations elsewhere, but most of us tend to quietly believe that history never progresses quite at the rate we would have it move if we were the deities of such things, and that the best realistic outcome was a few minor demonstrations scattered over the region, followed by the usual arrests.

On the other hand, nobody who knows anything about the Middle East could say that the demonstrations were unprecedented. Indeed, their coming to pass was inevitable, and the only unknown factor was time. There have been smaller demonstrations in the past, as well as a spiriting and dispiriting array of incarcerated opponents of Mubarak, not to speak of the opinion of most members of the Egyptian diaspora. More generally, as economist and political scientist Timur Kuran says:

A feature shared by certain major revolutions is that they were not anticipated. Here is an explanation, which hinges on the observation that people who come to dislike their government are apt to hide their desire for change as long as the opposition seems weak. Because of this preference falsification, a government that appears unshakeable might see its support crumble following a slight surge in the opposition’s apparent size, caused by events insignificant in and of themselves. Unlikely though the revolution may have appeared in foresight, it will in hindsight appear inevitable because its occurrence exposes a panoply of previously hidden conflicts.

But the possibility of predicting, in principle, the current crisis, does not remove from how unprecedented it feels. Whether or not they succeed, the demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, Sinai and Ismailiya represent a turning point in the politics and culture of the Middle East.

To get a measure of how large the effect will be, one need only observe the hesitant reactions of Western politicians when the news first broke. US Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, was quoted as saying, “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region, Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel … I would not refer to him as a dictator.” President Obama, as well as British Prime Minister David Cameron and many other Western heads of state, were all considerably less blundering than that, but they all seemed united in withholding their support for the demonstrators, and in merely doing the easiest thing possible: condemning the violence.

It is easy to be cynical about these reactions. It has become commonplace to hold up the tear gas canisters, emblazoned with the words “Made in the US”, and the fact that Egypt has consistently received one of the largest portions of the US foreign aid budget, as evidence that the West (and the US in particular) has behaved cynically in the past, and that therefore it is really in their interest to keep Mubarak propped up in power. But the question of the correctness, moral or political or otherwise, of these past actions, though important, bears only lightly on what is happening now. To be sure, the US might have done more in the past to keep Mubarak out of power. But most Western citizens hardly voiced a whimper in protest until these current protests. Spare a thought for Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Sarkozy, if you will. They were not the creators but the inheritors of the status quo, and their position is as difficult as it is possible to get in politics. Much as they might want Mubarak to leave, they must do battle with the question of political expediency, and of what is right in the long term.

And apart from our unavoidable deaths, the long term is an extremely difficult thing to work out. What are the potential consequences of the revolution, should it succeed? There are many worst-case scenarios that should be dealt with. One major complaint is the question of Israel. Egypt has been a reliable ally of Israel’s since 1979, and thus has been one of the major guarantors of its security. The fear of many is that a democratic Egypt, even if not taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood, would not necessarily maintain this alliance, leaving Israel in greater peril. That may be so (it is impossible to say with certainty), but if it is, that would make up for the greater long-term prospects for the region. Democracy, as is often said, is the best stability. The question of quite when a country is “ready” for democracy should be moot, since in Egypt’s case it is clear that the people want it, and what better indicator of its suitability is there than that?[1]

The possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood taking over has been much discussed, and it seems to be the consensus in the liberal media that it is rather unlikely. After all, the Brotherhood have about 100,000 supporters in a country of 80 million, as we are often told. This is an encouraging statistic, but not unambiguously so. The Brotherhood are the most popular opposition party in a state in which opposition parties are effectively outlawed. So the current 100,000 might turn into 10 million when its ideological brethren don’t have to live in so much fear. The number, therefore, might be misleading. However, there are other signs that its influence is not as strong as it would like. The New York Times has a piece showing that throughout the demonstrations the Brotherhood has been a bumbling and barely acknowledged presence. At first, it wavered on whether to support the protests, and later it wavered on whether to support ElBaradei. It does not seem to know its own place, and indeed one member of the Brotherhood categorically stated that the revolution had nothing to do with Islam, still less Islamism, and everything to do with the people.

Obama’s very careful and gradual Middle East policy has arguably been dealt an unexpected and significant blow. He called for change in the region, and was forthright about its need for democracy in his Cairo speech. “Let me be clear,” he said, “no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other. That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people.” Thus, the way he deals with the current crisis may turn out to be the defining point of his term, as far as foreign policy goes. If he is too eager to support the demonstrators, he risks weakening his alliances elsewhere in the region. If he does the opposite, then he will appear to be perpetuating the decades of US foreign policy that have hardly charmed the leaders and citizens of the Middle East. It is an unenviable position.

That is, if it really is his position. Perhaps the very impossibility of taking decisive action hints that it is not actually the place of the US President, or any other world leader, to do so. Rather, their position is a subtler but probably easier one. They must promote democracy implicitly, by the use of cultural rather than diplomatic influence, by exposing the citizens of the world to the liberating effects of democracy. This is, of course, not enough in itself, but it is a vitally important factor in the awakening of the democratic mind. Once the aspiration to democracy has taken hold, as it evidently has in Egypt, events must be allowed to take their natural course. The only official position, then, of a statesman qua statesman, should be a bold stand against violence, as well as a covert support of the protesters. As for the position of a statesman as a human being, that is another matter entirely.

Picture courtesy of http://yfrog.com/h0onggjj.

Be forewarned. The following contains spoilers.

The other day I finished Blood Meridian. How exactly I came to it I’m not entirely sure. Partly it must have been having seen No Country for Old Men a little while ago; partly it must have been Harold Bloom’s enthusiastic recommendation. The more I read about it before touching the thing itself, the clearer it became that the central focus and attraction of the book would be the judge, and so indeed it turned out. The first time we meet him, at a revival meeting, he announces to a crowd that the preacher at the pulpit is a fraud, and that he had been run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat, and that he was also wanted for violating children. So far, the judge is merely interesting, and we wonder a little about him and how he came to know these things. But then the crowd begin to ask him questions, to which he answers only negatively.

Judge, how did you come to have the goods on that no-account?

Goods? said the judge.

When was you in Fort Smith?

Fort Smith?

Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?

You mean the Reverend Green?

Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come but here.

I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.

They looked from one to the other.

Well where was it you run up on him?

I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.

He raised his glass and drank.

There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.

Now we are fascinated. What business, then, did he have announcing that the preacher was a fraud? He is called “the judge”: might that have anything to do with it? But as the book progresses, he only becomes an even greater mystery. He appears, to those who don’t know him, to be a charming and extraordinary man. He is certainly intelligent, and he is far more widely learned than most. Another character, the expriest, tells the book’s protagonist, the kid, the circumstances under which he first met the judge, and goes on to tell of all his preternatural abilities in every area of human endeavour that he dabbles in. When he draws, he draws such perfect likenesses that the subjects fear their soul is captured in the paper, and that if the paper were to be destroyed, they too would be destroyed. He can out-dance the devil himself. He is the greatest fiddler the expriest has ever seen and that’s an end to it. He holds forth on all topics that can be held forth on: palaeontology, geography, history. He appears to know all languages spoken by all people he comes across. In short, we are given to think he excels in everything he does, and that there must be something preternatural, and therefore something to be feared, about the man.

But these might just be statistics. It is also his uncanny way of being in the right place at the right time, even when the circumstances seem to have conspired against it. The expriest first sees him in the middle of a desert plain, sitting on a lone rock, without a horse or a canteen. His apparent ability to live without food or water is witnessed again later on, under stranger circumstances. When the gang of scalphunters that is the central collective of the book find themselves without ammunition and under attack by Apache Indians, he fashions gunpowder from the minerals around him, in combination with the urine of the gang. None of the attacking Indians survive.

Then there is the moment when we find out the judge, having played in a fatherly fashion with an Apache boy by a campfire, has killed and scalped the boy. He later seriously espouses the view that children should be put in a pit with wild dogs, and that they should be set to puzzle out from their proper clues the one of three doors that does not harbour wild lions.

The whole novel, it turns out, is a slow and tense build-up to the apocalyptic moment when the Glanton gang is massacred by the Yuma Indians. All pretences, such as they were, are from this time defenestrated, and the surviving members’ ambivalence towards the judge, though he was perfectly aware of them all along, are laid fully and irrevocably bare. Before this time, there were several opportunities to kill the judge, and we are not told why they are not taken. There is a terrifying and relentless sequence in which the judge follows the kid. I know you would not hide, he says. I know too that you’ve not the heart of a common assassin. I’ve passed before your gunsights twice this hour and will pass a third time. Why not show yourself?

Painting of the judge giving a lecture on geology, by Samuel Chamberlain, whose account of the real-life judge strongly influenced the fictional one.

Perhaps what is most terrifying about the judge is just how mysterious he is. We don’t know why he “outs” the preacher in the first chapter, and we don’t know why he insists on being accompanied by an imbecile in the latter third of the book. And we don’t really know why he draws everything he sees in his notebook, even though he tells us that whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent, and that recording them in some way effectively destroys them forever. (Though of course, that may be his entire raison d’être: perhaps he really did know the preacher, and what we saw was the culmination of revenge, resulting in the preacher’s being erased from existence.) But what compels us about him is not that he is mysterious, it’s that his mystery feels somehow truthful, and more, feels as though it is a dark truth. This in itself is mysterious, since the philosophy he professes doesn’t strike me as remotely sound. It can be summarised as “war is god”: he believes that all trades and endeavours are subservient to the trade of war and, echoing Nietzsche, that morality is merely an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak. Sound or unsound, his philosophy seems to emerge the victor at the book’s close, which sees him dancing naked towering above other dancers, after the presumed murder of the kid. This might imply to many readers that his philosophy really is truth, but that would, I think, be a misreading. The judge fascinates partly because he makes us think of him as something closer to a force of nature than a product of it, that he is speaking from a realm beyond ours, beyond good and evil. That is an alluring trait, but it is after all only a trait, and not evidence of the truth-value of his philosophy.

Cormac McCarthy is an elusive author, both in this book and in real life. It seems unlikely that he will ever hand us the answer to the riddle that is the judge, if he knows it himself. But that is all to the good: the immense value of Blood Meridian, it seems to me, is that we are presented with such a fascinating riddle, and we are maddened in trying to work out the answer. If you haven’t already, I urge you to go out and read this book.

There were two different sorts of reverence on show. There was the reverence of the activist: that is to say, the reverence that originates in a deep desire to see everything in terms of the subject of your activism. For Mr West, Jay-Z was not just a talented rapper, he was the contemporary incarnation of all black culture. Jay-Z did not merely have influences, he absorbed the spirits of the greats that went before him, Martin Luther King included. I’m not familiar with Mr West’s work. Perhaps it is simply an element of his style to vastly hyperbolise everything. But there can surely be no excuse for tortuously finding ways to compare Sean Carter with William Shakespeare.

The other sort of reverence was that of the initiate, the reverence that appears to have no points of reference, and that is so surprised to find anything at all of any artistic value that the shock overwhelms him and stunts his critical faculties. Mr Holdengräber and Jay-Z compared their musical upbringings; Mr Holdengräber’s consisted (though I’m sure he exaggerates somewhat) of different versions of The Magic Flute. His childhood was presumably quite far from Marcy Projects, and he has the understandable (and commendable) interest in lives far different from his own. But he has evidently allowed himself to be blinded by this distance, and by the fact (which should hardly be surprising) that rap can be about more than simply glorified violence.

Amidst all this, Mr Carter appeared an island of sanity and reason, here and there puncturing pomposity with wit, and appearing suitably confused by rambling improvised dissertations that only those speaking them could possibly understand (see above, and the comparison with Shakespeare). It is not as though he didn’t buy into the myth that the two who flanked him espoused with such fanatical zeal (though it was difficult to tell, and he appeared suitably distant), but he did appear more able to place it in its proper perspective.

There is much controversy in the psychological and legal communities regarding the extent to which rape is sexually motivated and the extent to which it is power-driven. We can surely say without reams of evidence that neither in isolation is anything like a satisfactory solution. Sexual desire exists in virtually everyone, and hardly ever manifests itself as rape; the desire for power exists in many people and doesn’t usually result in such extreme harm. There is also the question, in the latter case, of exactly what sort of power rape confers on the rapist. If it does confer power, it is only of the most worthless kind (as opposed to, say, owning a multinational company or being the President of France), and we therefore must conclude that the person who desires this sort of power is suffering some kind of mental imbalance. But neither are the two in combination quite a satisfactory solution, for the problems that attend them individually exist in combination, too.

The rapist is not a normal person. Evidence suggests that unprosecuted rapists very often rape more than once (in one study, most of the 120 rapists involved were repeat rapists, averaging at 5.8 rapes each), and whether or not this is simply because they realise they are very likely to escape untouched by the legal system is besides the point. The point is that rape is not generally a one-off occurrence. A man (and it is usually a man—according to an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, they account for almost 99% of rapists)[1] does not decide one day to try rape out, nor is he induced to do it solely by anger or sexual frustration or the influence of some mind-altering substance. A man only rapes if he has the mind of a rapist.

What then constitutes such a mind? Again, this is hardly a settled matter, but my own tentative conclusion, gleaned from attempting to step into a rapist’s mind, is that they suffer from a feeling of inferiority, or powerlessness, with respect to women. This might arise from an inability to win them over in the usual fashion, and a concomitant feeling, usually unfounded, that women generally disrespect him as a result. Now this feeling of inferiority, even if attended with heightened anger, might be no bad thing in itself, if it could be sublimated in the form of comedy or art. But for whatever reason the rapist feels not only that he cannot sublimate in those ways, but also that there is only one way to express his frustration.

Christopher Hitchens, in a controversial article in Vanity Fair, theorised that men are funnier than women because it is men who have to be funny, since that’s essentially all they have to offer. It is men who have to do the seducing, and women who are seduced. Of course, this is a vast oversimplification, but it seems to express the general dynamic. It is surely no coincidence that this imbalance in the sexual politics is reflected proportionally by the number of men who are rapists, as opposed to women.

The brain is of course an extremely complicated little object, and my theory (if indeed it is mine!) that a male feeling of inferiority with regard to women, and an inability to express the resultant frustration in more productive ways, is a major cause of the rapist’s mentality, is only a theory, and almost certainly does not account for all cases. Indeed, it may account for other sorts of deviancy besides rape. But my feeling is that the theory, or a similar but more precisely worded version, accounts for a large part of what motivates rape.

If the theory is correct, then it is not too difficult to see how the existence of rapists is not good for the species as a whole. That’s not quite right. The existence of rapists doesn’t by itself do much to society either way. What is important is the rest of society’s attitude to them. If most of us were not repulsed by rape, and did not think it a crime worthy of severe punishment, then rape would become much more commonplace; and I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that society would in some way be dominated by it. More of us would be born to rapist fathers, and the greater acceptability of rape would lead to a greater disrespect and subjugation of women, and thus less need for the ability to sublimate. Either the ability to sublimate is genetic, in which case the gene pool would be more disinclined to it, or it is cultural, in which case, the increased amount of rapist fathers would cripple the next generation’s ability to sublimate. We then have a society which innovates less, and is thus less immune to survival pressures.

If we grant the central importance to our species (and that of virtually every other species imaginable) of sex, then it stands to clear reason that our attitude to it is an important determinant of the state of our species. And further, if we believe, as Freud did and most of his intellectual descendants do, in the importance of sublimation and its fundamental relation to sex and desire in general, we can conclude that the rapist’s state of mind is not only an unhealthy one, but one inimical to the thriving of the species at large. This is perhaps ironic, given what Freud thought of rape, but it does conform to our intuitive understanding that it is a bad thing. Although it is not difficult to imagine a thriving species for which rape is common and usual (such species do exist), it is difficult to see how such a species could compete with a species that finds rape repulsive.

There’s an interesting debate going on between Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers on the provability of God’s existence. The standard atheist position on this matter seems to be disbelief for lack of evidence to the contrary, but that in principle it might be possible to conjure some piece of evidence that might prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that “God” exists. Coyne offers, as an example, a series of highly unlikely events, all perpetrated by a being calling himself Jesus. Myers rightly insists he still would not believe in God or Jesus if these happened.

As many of the commenters on Coyne’s post noted, this feat might easily have been performed by aliens—or indeed by Zeus, or Thor, or any other deity you could care to mention. We might bring in objections based on how likely these deities are to pretend they’re Jesus, but that’s immaterial, for we are told that God moves in mysterious ways.

Although Myers is correct in resisting as evidence a series of unlikely events, he goes one step further and entirely denies the possibility that there could be any evidence of God’s (or possibly just a god’s) existence. He is right to be extremely cautious, because it is pretty difficult to think of something that God might do to prove his existence. Almost oxymoronically, it will not suffice to simply present himself, for the aforementioned reasons: he might simply be a very powerful non-god pretending. One imagines, also, that if God came down to us he would not be able to offer us an a priori proof of his existence, since if it involves self-evidence it is likely already to have been achieved. Of course, it’s not impossible, either.

So I thought about what God might do to prove his existence (if he/she/it existed), and here is what I have. Suppose that a being of some description descended from the sky and announced his presence before the world. Let’s say she convened a press conference. Now suppose that this being made the claim that God exists, and that she can prove it. She then presents a physics paper that answers some previously unanswered scientific mystery with the claim that only God (being constituted of certain parts necessary to call him God) could possibly explain it. The paper is shown to leading physicists, and they all agree that there is no alternative answer. To allay any remaining doubts, she presents for our delectation a video (in some yet-to-be-invented format), actually showing God creating the universe, as well as everything else that followed. It will, of course, be possible to fast-forward. The point of the video is to show certain cosmological phenomena that scientists are not yet aware of, but whose existence can further be proved by a series of unerring physics papers. Again, the scientists will look over these papers and see that they are good.

Of course, none of this necessarily says anything about the nature of God, other than telling us those properties he must have (according to the first paper) in order to create the universe. But the virtue of the scenario, in the context of proving God’s existence, is that it’s not merely unlikely. It is also, as far as I can see, impossible (but not logically impossible) without the existence of a God. Assuming that the scientists who read the papers really are good, it is unlikely they will be fooled by a paper that fraudulently claims to show beyond doubt that God must exist. It is still possible for them all to be put under some spell, but that’s something of an evasion, because as far as we’re concerned, it is science that’s just as valid as any that went before it, and, if we are to be rigorous to a fault, we would have to conclude, in all honesty, that we don’t know whether the world around us exists.

But such proof is almost infinitely unlikely, judging by past experience, ever to appear; so the intellectually honest approach is to go on as though God doesn’t exist.

There is something rather premature about the recent “controversy” over Hawking’s statements on God’s existence. Firstly, there is nothing at all new in what we know of Hawking’s views. Theists (and believers of all varieties in a creator) might have held open the possibility of Hawking’s agnosticism, but this agnosticism was only ever a purely theoretical one anyway. The hope seems to have arisen largely from the concluding paragraph in A Brief History of Time:

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.

“The mind of God” is naturally an alluring term that sounds like the product of an agnostic brain. It carries with it an appeal to our civilization-long search for the answer to the question, why are we here? But it really only shows the usefulness of God as a metaphor. “God” is simply the origin of all our laws—and clearly, if this was all that a theist believed in, he would be no theist at all.

On the other side, there are those atheists who believe Hawking’s views are in any way revelatory, or constitute any real progress in the debate—including, presumably, Hawking himself. My understanding is that his new book posits M-theory (an extension of string theory) as the final explanation for the existence of the universe, thereby closing off the final gap for God to reside in. Even if M-theory were a fully explanatory theory that answered all our fundamental questions (which it isn’t), Hawking does not appear to see that this line of reasoning, of persistently squeezing God’s role into a singularity, is ultimately futile. Theists who want to believe will always find a way of interpreting the evidence conveniently, or they will simply point out that to conclude God’s non-existence is a misinterpretation, which technically is true. (That is not the point, though: such a bare role for God obliterates all the meaning he might have had.) If it were proved beyond any doubt that there is no possible way in which God could have helped in the creation of the universe, theists will simply reply, as they have done here, that God’s role is not a physical one, and that his job was far more profound than that—he created the laws of physics whereby the universe could create itself. As the Jesuit priest and scholar Fr Robert Spitzer says, “[the law of gravity] has a specific constant associated with it and specific characteristics, and it has specific effects on mass-energy and even on space-time itself. This is a very curious definition of ‘nothing’.” It seems absurd, but even if it could be shown that the laws of physics were a mathematical necessity (and most theologians agree that God is not above that), theists might still find a way around that, arguing that, inconceivable though it might be to us mere humans, there might be nothing necessary about necessity. There, at least, the theistic position might be reduced to literal absurdity, but that seems far off.

There is, perhaps, a larger force here at work. With every new year, science unearths discoveries that seem to hack away at the necessity of a god for our understanding of the universe and our place in it. The inevitable result in the religious communities of the world, if they are thoughtful, is that they resign themselves to an ever more abstract God, that has an ever more subjective value. Even though it sometimes seems that everyone has their own definition of God, from bearded Michelangelo figure to love, nonetheless this (relatively) new understanding of the creator has evolved by natural selection up to the point that it now looks perfectly designed to withstand these insults to his integrity. What this means for the future of religion (in the West, at least) is hard to tell. This increasing separation from practical reality might begin to expose itself to believers as a fraud. On the other hand, its strength might lie exactly in its subjectivity.

Is theft really so bad? Perhaps, but only if ownership is so good.

In the last discussion, it did not appear to take too long, or require too much marshalling of evidence, to conclude that no moral system can sustain the instinct to murder: either the species dies out, or the instinct does. However, it turns out that this instinct may be the only one that can be dealt with so summarily, since it is the only one that deals directly with survival. When dealing with theft, we are instantly confronted with a problem of definition. The connotations of the word “theft” are too strong to use without question. It would perhaps be more accurate to think of theft as one kind of taking, and specifically one which implies the existence of, and tacit social agreement to, the idea of ownership.

Our task might be simplified if we split the world of objects into different categories, according to their relation to the wellbeing of the species as a whole. This appears to be necessary, because we can think of at least two kinds of taking: of objects that are absolutely necessary to their “owners”, and those that aren’t. It is quite obvious that, if somebody is starving to death, and they chance upon an edible loaf of bread, while at the same time I am perfectly full, it would be wrong to take the bread from them. This is true if we accept the conclusion of the previous post, since this action is the same as murder. If, however, I too am starving, it seems to be of entirely no value to speak of whether my taking the bread is good or bad. Since I have equal right, by the laws of nature, to live as the other does, there is no sense in which any one of us can lay claim to ownership of the bread. At this stage, we are assuming nothing about the nature of the species in question other than that it must eat to live—we are not assuming that it has any established system of ownership. Even if the species did have an established system of ownership, the basic fact that denying a starving person a loaf of bread, if you can possibly help it, is the same as murder, trumps any such system. So we can tentatively say that there exist at least two kinds of object, those that are directly necessary for survival, and those that aren’t.

But this doesn’t take into account all kinds of object that play a part in human life. The second category might be further split into two: those objects that only serve for our pleasure (defined in the broadest possible sense), and those that are used as investments for some future benefit, whether that be pleasure or security. With these two types of object, it is not obvious that the instinct to take them would doom the survival or advancement of the species. After all, at this stage it is still possible to speculate that the instinct to take another person’s pleasure object (say, a book), if the “owner” did not have the wit or could not devote the effort to protect it against such taking, might trump the total good granted to the species as a whole by the “ownership” of these pleasure objects. Investment objects are slightly clearer. A farmer’s tools, as well as his land, are some of his investment objects, and it is apparent that taking these would severely restrict his ability to survive, but would not kill him, so we can’t say that it is tantamount to murder. The only way to assess the moral value of theft is first to consider the idea of ownership, and to answer the question whether it redounds to the good of the species, or otherwise.

There is an extent to which we humans find ownership natural, and feel strongly that those possessions we have are truly ours, and that it would be a great injustice if they were taken from us. This might give us the impression that we have evolved to have this feeling—and indeed, this might be the case. But if that is so, then it is not easy to argue that this feeling, this natural tendency towards ownership, is in any way good for us as a species. After all, the wide majority of nature is perfectly happy without such a feeling, and indeed there are those, such as sharks, who are so perfectly well adapted to their environments that it is difficult to see how ownership could in any way be useful to them. Moreover, if we imagine that the Great White community were tomorrow to develop an instinct for ownership, we might even guess that they would be too preoccupied with settling the consequent issues to give their full attention to daily hunting, and this might even be harmful for them. At any rate, it is hard to see how their comfortable position would improve.

It is also hard to see how even those species that are very low on the food chain would improve their plight if they developed an instinct for ownership. On further reflection, it seems apparent that the instinct can only develop once the species in question have become sufficiently masters of their environment to turn their attention inwards in such a way. The precise way in which we developed this instinct is not obvious. Perhaps it actually came about in the days in which we were still struggling against the elements, when we first invented tools which we thought should never fall into the hands of rival tribes. These tools would have been effectively owned by the whole tribe, but once we had mastered our environments the instinct remained, and since we had no need for it in its group from, we turned it in on ourselves. However it developed, we can be reasonably certain that it can only develop once the species is relatively comfortable, and once it is reasonably intelligent. Once it has established itself, its uses become apparent. We want to own things because we perceive there to be some utility or value in them. We might be wrong, but we are right enough of the time that the cumulative effect on our species is a good one. We make tools that make agriculture possible and then more efficient, that make hunting relatively risk-free, that allow us to build houses—I need not bore the reader with the full list. All of this is possible without ownership, but ownership gives us the incentive to employ our fullest efforts in this regard. It might be argued that the inevitable psychological effect of all this is that we place too high a premium on ownership, and only rarely does it have real value, which means that we have an inflated anxiety about possessions. But the uses of ownership clearly outweigh such psychological drawbacks as there may be.

Be this as it may, it does not mean that the ownership instinct is unambiguously good, in the way that the (indiscriminate) killing instinct is unambiguously bad. Given that we are taking survival as the ultimate bedrock of any morality, there are clearly considerations that can supersede the ownership instinct. If you are rich and a poor man steals from you out of necessity, is it right to react with outrage? Is it possible to say that the thief was morally wrong, when survival is the most important thing of all? In a milder case, what if you can find a considerably better use for something than its current owner—would it be wrong to steal then? If you are correct in your assessment, then stealing is better for society than not stealing. There are other considerations, too. If the “institution” of ownership is generally a good thing for society, then there might be times when non-ownership is better for society. If, for instance, a reclusive billionaire buys Picasso’s Guernica only to hide it in a dark lair for his amusement alone, we have a case where the needs of culture at large are being set aside for the sake of private ownership, where non-ownership might be better overall.

We can conclude with some certainty, then, that the ownership instinct is good for society so far and only so far as it serves society. Alongside this ownership instinct must come a natural respect for the ownership claims of others, if the instinct is to have any positive effect at all, and this means that stealing, as a general rule, runs counter to the good of the species. However, it is not difficult to concoct cases in which stealing has a positive effect for the species. If we are only slavish respecters of our instincts, then, we might be blinded to the original purpose of those instincts.

We might then look at the situation more closely at possible moral systems, and assess them for their survival-effectiveness. We can say, for instance, that a certain species has an inclination towards certain things, a disinclination towards other things, it produces a certain amount of offspring per mother, and so on. A successful moral system, then, is taken initially to be one which holds all these inclinations and disinclinations, and a number of other factors, in such a balance that allows the species to survive. An even more successful system is one which allows an even more complete thriving of the species. With this in mind we can very quickly rule out any moral system which contains a universal inclination towards indiscriminate killing, since there is no other inclination or factor which can cancel out the effect of this. If all members of the species only think about killing, we can be certain that, even with some protective instincts to counter this, the balance will always be in favour of the killing, and therefore it is an unsustainable instinct.

Even if we limit the indiscriminate killing to a smaller section of the population, there is no clear way to counter its effects. Let’s say that it is only the males that have the indiscriminate killing instinct. Unless the females are considerably stronger than the males, the killing instinct will clearly triumph. However, if the female is indeed considerably stronger, then it is reasonable to suppose that evolution will weed out the killing instinct soon enough, since it is literally useless (in that it is never used). This last point, I think, is made even more certain when we consider the dimension of sexual selection. It is not absurd, in itself, that the females will choose a male partner that kills indiscriminately (since we are assuming such an instinct is there anyway, so they have no choice), but equally, given that we are assuming that the females have a protective instinct (otherwise their superior strength would not be an issue), it would be unreasonable for them to choose the indiscriminate killer over the doting father (or the slightly less indiscriminate killer). If that last point requires a modicum of intelligence on the part of the female, then we can at least assert that those couples that don’t contain a killer will have a greater rate of survival than otherwise, and so in due course an instinctive aversion in the female towards these killers will develop.

What if only the females are indiscriminate killers? This seems even more unlikely than the previous alternative, since presumably the females will have a level of protectiveness over their offspring. The same arguments apply, however: if the male is considerably stronger than the female, the instinct would be rendered useless and thus be eradicated, and if the female is stronger, then there is nothing to stop it killing its own young.

We can say with some certainty, then, that an instinct for indiscriminate killing, whether in all of the species or only in one sex, would never survive the pressures of natural selection, and thus, in a possible perfect moral system, indiscriminate killing cannot exist. So far, so obvious, as we have only dealt with killing, which has obvious effects on survival. But in coming posts we’ll take a look at other inclinations, like those towards stealing, raping, saving another’s life, believing in God, and so on.

To be continued.