Confessions of a Heretic Read online

  The difficult case is that of mental decline. What should we do – if anything – to escape a future without those distinguishing attributes that make us persons for each other and for ourselves – understanding, self-consciousness, inter-personal emotions, and the ability to face each other ‘I’ to ‘I’? Those capacities are fundamental to personhood, and to lose them is to cease to exist as a person, even while continuing to exist as a human being. Of course, this ceasing to exist as a person does not cancel the right to life or make it any less a crime for another to peremptorily take that life away. The crime here is comparable to that of infanticide. Piety requires us to respect life that was once the life of a person, just as we respect life that one day will become the life of a person.

  So the question is this: is there anything that it is permissible for me to do now, by way of putting in place the timely death that will spare me such a fate? Should I, for example, take up some dangerous sport that will ensure that, when the first onset of debility occurs, I make the fatal mistake that leads to my death? But what if the mistake is not fatal, and leads instead to life in a wheelchair? And how can one plan for death prior to debilitation, when it is only in a state of debilitation, when all plans are at an end, that the plan is justified?

  From ancient times it has been the role of the philosopher to show us how we should think of death, so as to overcome our fear of it. Epicurus and following him Lucretius argued that there is nothing to fear in death since death is nothing: I do not survive it, so there is nothing bad for me on the other side of it. In an important sense death doesn’t happen to me: when I am, death is not; and when death is, I am not. That is just one example of the attempt to neutralise the fear of death by thinking. More recent philosophers have taken the line that it is not thinking but doing that counts. Thus Heidegger tells us that we overcome our anxiety by adopting another existential posture than that of everyday instrumentality. He calls this posture ‘being-towards-death’, and implies that by adopting it we incorporate death into our lives, overcome its fearful quality, achieve a kind of serenity in action that takes full cognisance of our mortality.

  Whatever we think of those arguments they don’t help us with the problem of senility. Maybe I don’t fully survive the onset of senility; but enough of me survives for it to be true that senility is something that happens to me, and which, in happening, takes away something of supreme value, which is the envelope of my life, the proper death which would have completed me. And as for Heidegger – being-towards-death sounds grand and inspiring as an existential posture. But being-towards-senility has no comparable appeal.

  The question is, how should I live now, and what preparations should I make, in the face of this threat – the threat of living beyond my own self-identity as an acting, knowing, loving creature? I think we should take inspiration from Aristotle, and switch the focus of the question. Here, roughly, is the picture that Aristotle paints of the moral life. I cannot know now what will be my future circumstances or desires. All I can know are various general truths about the human condition, and about the dispositions of character that enable people to deal successfully with the contingencies of life. Success in action means acting in such a way that others would admire and endorse you. And happiness comes about when we see our own condition as others might see it, and see also that it is good to be the thing that we are. All I can do now therefore, to confront the vicissitudes of a future life that I cannot predict, is to acquire the dispositions that I would admire in another – the dispositions that we know as the virtues. For Aristotle as for most ancient thinkers these dispositions are clustered around a central core – the four cardinal virtues of prudence, courage, justice and temperance, which between them ensure our moral robustness and our acceptability in the eyes of others. All I can do now to guarantee my future happiness is to exercise the virtues, so that they become part of my character, and so that, when the time comes, I do what is worthy and honourable and earn the approbation of those on whose good opinion I depend. Of course the virtuous person may suffer where the vicious person would not. In battle, for instance, it is often the courageous man who dies, the coward who survives – but survives to what purpose? And in the ordinary business of life the coward is overcome and defeated by the slightest adversity, and is always at one remove from the happiness that he aims for.

  Likewise, if we are to confront the threat of senility we should first address the question of the virtues that would enable us to deal with it. And this means the dispositions in another person that would elicit our admiration, and which would show him or her to be in some way victorious in the confrontation, as Brutus snatched victory from defeat when he fell on his sword. One thing that always elicits a negative response in the observer is cowardice. People who cannot bear the thought of death, who have done nothing to understand or accept it, who flee from it or who deceive themselves into thinking that it can be indefinitely postponed elicit in all normal people the thought, let me not be like that! And those who avoid the fear of death by having their bodies frozen, to be revived when medical science is able to give them another go, do not merely repel us with their cowardice: they also exhibit a monstrous selfishness, in refusing to relinquish the planet to their successors, and choosing instead to burden the earth with their unappealing presence for all time. It is just such people who will push medicine in the morally repugnant direction advocated by Aubrey de Grey and the transhumanists – towards the goal of immortality.

  Courage therefore is the sine qua non of any attempt to deal with the threat of senility – courage to face the truth, and to live fully in the face of it. With courage a person can go about living in another way – a way that will give maximum chance of dying with his faculties intact. This other way is not the way of the welfare culture in which we are all immersed. It does not involve the constant search for comforts or the obsessive pursuit of health. On the contrary, it is a way of benign shabbiness and self-neglect, of risky enjoyments and bold adventures. It involves constant exercise – but not of the body. Rather, exercise of the person, through relationships with others, through sacrifice, through the search for opportunities to be involved and exposed. Such, at least, is my intuition. The life of benign shabbiness is not a life of excess. Of course you should drink, smoke, eat fatty foods – but not to the point of gluttony. The purpose is to weaken the body while strengthening the mind. The risks you take should not damage your will or your relationships, but only your chances of survival. Officious doctors and health fascists will assail you, telling you to correct your diet, to take better forms of exercise, to drink more water and less wine. If you pursue a life of risk-taking and defiance the thought-police will track you down, and your life style will be held up to ridicule and contempt. It is not that anyone intends you to live beyond your time. Rather, to use Adam Smith’s famous image, the old people’s gulag arises by an invisible hand from a false conception of human life – a conception that does not see death as a part of life, and timely death as the fruit of it.

  Each of us must decide for himself what the life of benign shabbiness requires of him. Obviously dangerous pursuits like hunting and mountaineering have a part to play. Equally important is the forthright expression of opinion, so as to win grateful friends and implacable enemies, a process that enhances both the consolations of social life, and the tensions of day-today living. I am not sure that I could live like my friend the writer and campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali; but there is an adorable recklessness in her truth-directed way of life that makes each moment of it worthwhile. Going out to help others, in ways that involve danger and the threat of disease, is also a useful form of exposure. The main point, it seems to me, is to maintain a life of active risk and affection, while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.

  Notes

  1 See Bernard Williams’s classic essay, ‘The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality
’, in Problems of the Self, Cambridge, CUP, 1973.

  2 See the discussion by Vladimir Jankélévitch, La mort, Paris, Grasset, 1966.

  11

  – Conserving Nature –

  Environmentalism has all the hall-marks of a left-wing cause: a class of victims (future generations), an enlightened vanguard who fights for them (the eco-warriors), powerful philistines who exploit them (the capitalists), and endless opportunities to express resentment against the successful, the wealthy and the West. The style too is leftist: the environmentalist is young, dishevelled, socially disreputable, his mind focused on higher things; the opponent is dull, middle aged, smartly dressed and usually American. The cause is designed to recruit the intellectuals, with facts and theories carelessly bandied about, and activism encouraged. Environmentalism is something you join, and for many young people it has the quasi-redemptive and identity-bestowing character of the twentieth-century revolutions. It has its military wing, in Greenpeace and other activist organisations, and also its intense committees, its odium theologicum and its campaigning journals. Environmentalists who step out of line like Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, are denounced at the important meetings, and thereafter demonised as heretics. In short, it has the appearance of those secular religions, like socialism, communism and anarchism, which turned the world upside down during the 20th century. Hence conservatives are instinctively opposed to it, and begin to look around for facts and theories of their own, in order to fortify their conviction that global warming, loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels, widespread pollution, or whatever, are simply left-wing myths, comparable to the ‘crisis of capitalism’ prophesied by the 19th-century socialists.

  However, the cause of the environment is not, in itself, a left-wing cause at all. It is not about ‘liberating’ or empowering the victim, but about safeguarding resources. It is not about ‘progress’ or ‘equality’ but about conservation and equilibrium. Its following may be young and dishevelled; but that is largely because people in suits have failed to realise where their real interests, and their real values, lie. Environmentalists may seem opposed to capitalism, but – if they understood matters correctly – they would be far more opposed to socialism, with its gargantuan, uncorrectable and state-controlled projects, than to the ethos of free enterprise. Indeed, environmentalism is the quintessential conservative cause, the most vivid instance in the world as we know it, of that partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn, which Burke defended as the conservative archetype. Its fundamental aim is not to bring about some radical reordering of society, or the abolition of inherited rights and privileges. It is not, in itself, interested in equality, except between generations, and its attitude to private property is, or ought to be, positive – for it is only private ownership that confers responsibility for the environment as opposed to the unqualified right to exploit it, a right whose effect we saw in the ruined landscapes and poisoned waterways of the former Soviet empire.

  But how should conservatives shape their environmental policies? What laws should they pass, and what resources should they protect? The temptation is to embrace some comprehensive plan, like Roosevelt’s plan for national parks – to protect some part of the environment in perpetuity, and meanwhile to control by law the use of the remainder. However, such statist solutions go against the grain for conservatives – they pose a threat not just to individual liberty but also to the process (of which the free market is the paradigm instance) whereby consensual solutions emerge. State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail, the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed. The ruination of the Dutch and Danish coastal landscape by banks of hideous wind turbines is a case in point. They stand in looming white ranks on every horizon, waving white arms like disconsolate ghosts, blighting the landscape with their nightmare vision of judgement day. People put up with them because they have been told that they are the solution to depleted energy resources. Yet they produce only a small amount of power, will never be able to replace the coal-fired power stations that provide the bulk of the country’s electricity, and have all kinds of negative environmental effects, not least on the populations of migrating birds. However, states don’t easily admit to their mistakes; and the official propaganda continues to speak as though the wind farms were the lasting proof of socialist rectitude.

  Another and more serious example is observable in America. The most important man-made environmental problem in this country is that presented by the spread of the suburbs. Suburbanisation causes the increasing use of automobiles, and the dispersal of populations in ways that exponentially increase the consumption of energy and non-degradable packaging. Conservatives argue that this is a result of freedom and the market. People settle outside the towns because that is what they want. They are moving out in search of green fields, wooded gardens, tranquillity – in short, their own little patch of nature. But this is not so. They are not moving out in search of a natural environment, but in search of a suburban environment, and they are doing so because the suburban environment is massively subsidised by the state. The roads, the infrastructure and the schools – all are state investments, which entirely imbalance the natural economy of the town, and make it easier, safer and cheaper to live on the edge of it – an edge that is constantly moving further from the centre, so destroying the advantages offered to those who move to the suburbs just the year after they move. The mechanism here is not a free market mechanism. Much of the expansion of the suburbs proceeds by the exercise of ‘eminent domain’ – that provision in American law which gives the official bodies powers of expropriation equal to, and sometimes exceeding, the powers exerted by the socialist governments of Europe. Roads are one obvious instance of this, and the mania for building them in order to maintain traffic flows at a level arbitrarily imposed by official bodies, is the most important cause of the reckless mobility of American society. The true market solution to the problem of traffic congestion – which is to get out of your car and walk – is not, in America, available, since there is no way that you could walk to your destination. Be it the shop, the church, the school or just your nearest friend, suburbanisation has put your goal beyond pedestrian reach.

  But you cannot live in the centre of the cities any more, the suits complain: they’re not safe. Downtown is for blacks and hispanics; for bums and drop-outs; the schools are appalling, the crime-rate soaring and the place rife with drugs, alcohol and prostitution. Well yes, that’s exactly what happens, when the state subsidises the suburbs, imposes zoning laws that prevent proper mixed use in the towns, and engages in its own gargantuan housing projects which drive the middle classes out of the city centers. All this occurs in defiance of the market solution and, as Jane Jacobs pointed out in The Death and Life of American Cities, it deprives the city of its eyes and its ears, of its close communities and natural fellowship. Do the Italian cities have crime-ridden centres like the American? Why is it that everyone wants to live in the middle of Paris and not on the edge?

  I mention the example not only because it illustrates how far environmental damage has advanced and how difficult it will be to rectify it, but also because it illustrates two rather more important points: first, the mistaken view that it is the market, and not the state, that has created the problem; and secondly the equally mistaken view that the environment can be discussed without raising questions of aesthetics. In my view the problems come precisely when we interrupt the normal ways in which people solve their problems by free interaction. In other words, the problems come from expropriating the paths of rational consensus – as they are expropriated by the state, whenever it uses its powers of eminent domain. And the solutions come when we allow our aesthetic sense to take over, aiming at what looks right, wha
t feels right, and what we can vindicate to the eyes and hearts of our neighbours. American cities have decayed because vast tax-funded resources have been available for the building of roads and housing projects, for the purchase and demolition of otherwise habitable slums, for the horizontal spread of infrastructure, and for the imposition of crazy zoning laws which ensure that where you can buy things you cannot do things, and where you can do things you cannot live. And the solutions to these problems emerge when people, constrained by the natural limitations posed by the need to reach consensual solutions, and without the gargantuan schemes of officialdom, set about building a neighbourhood that looks right to those who live in it, and which is welcoming to those who buy and sell and work.

  As I discuss in ‘Building to Last’, this is something that Leon Krier has illustrated, in his designs for Poundbury on the Prince of Wales’s estate in Dorset. As architect in charge he has imposed no overarching plan, no zoning, no publicly owned building, and only those roads that the houses themselves require. He has not set any limit to height but only to the number of stories of the houses, and left people free to build as they choose, provided only that their houses fit in with those of their neighbours, using materials and details that conform to a publicly accepted aesthetic, and defining public spaces and streets that are endorsed by the population as spaces and streets of their own. The result is an aesthetic success, and for that very reason an environmental success: compact, sparing in its use of space, with roads that are narrow but not congested since you don’t need to drive on them to reach your natural destination, be it shop, pub, friend or school. Energy consumption per head is a fraction of American suburban levels, and crime, in those self-policing streets, is non-existent.