In the preceding chapters I have described the kind of political, economic, educational, religious and philosophical devices that must be used if we are ever to achieve the good ends that we all profess to desire. The energy created by sexual restraint is the motive power which makes it possible for us to conceive those desirable ends and to think out the means for realizing them. We see, then, that the particular problem of moralizing the energy produced by continence is the same as the general problem of realizing ideal ends. This being so, it is unnecessary for me to discuss it any further. The matter can be summed up in a couple of sentences. The third and only satisfactory solution of the problem of sex is that which combines the acceptance, at least by the ruling classes, of pre-nuptial chastity and absolute monogamy with complete legal equality between women and men and with the adoption of a political, economic, educational, religious, philosophical and ethical system of the kind described in this book.
I have discussed the problem of good and evil on the plane of the body and the problem of good and evil in relation to sex, as manifested on all the planes of being. We must now consider good and evil on the plane of the emotions. There is very little that need be said in this context. All the familiar deadly sins are the product of separate emotions. Anger, envy, fear—these insist on the various aspects of our animal separateness from one another. Sloth exists on all the planes, and can be physical, emotional or intellectual. In all its forms sloth is a kind of negative malignity—a refusal to do what ought to be done.
Some vices are animal, some are strictly human. The human vices, which are in general the most dangerous, the most fruitful in undesirable results, are the various lusts for power, social position and ownership. Pride, vanity, ambition and avarice are attachments to objects of desire which have existence only in human societies. Being completely dissociated from the body, such vices as lust for power and avarice are able to manifest themselves in a bewildering variety of forms and with an energy that is immune from the satiety which occasionally interrupts all physical addictions. The permutations and combinations of lust or of gluttony are strictly limited and their manifestations are as discontinuous as physical appetite. It is far otherwise with the lust for power or the lust for possessions. These cravings are spiritual, therefore are unremittingly separative and evil; have no dependence on the body, therefore can assume almost any form.
Under the existing dispensation, popular morality does not condemn the lust for power or the craving for social pre-eminence. European and American children are brought up to admire the social climber and worship his success, to envy the rich and eminent and at the same time to respect and obey them. In other words, the two correlated vices of ambition and sloth are held up as virtues. There can be no improvement in our world until people come to be convinced that the ambitious power-seeker is as disgusting as the glutton or the miser—that ‘the last infirmity of noble mind’ is just as much of an infirmity as avarice or cruelty (with one or both of which, incidentally, it is very often associated), just as squalidly an addiction, on its human plane, as any physical addiction to drink or sexual perversion.
The human or spiritual vices are the most harmful in their results and the hardest to resist. (La Rochefoucauld remarks that men frequently desert love for ambition, but very rarely desert ambition for love.) Furthermore, their spiritual nature makes it hard for them to be distinguished, in certain of their manifestations, from virtues. This difficulty becomes particularly great when power, wealth and social position are represented as being means to desirable ends. (In the story of the temptation in the wilderness, Satan attempts to confuse the moral issue in precisely this way.)
But good ends, that is to say a state of greatest possible unification, can be achieved only by the use of good, that is to say of intrinsically unifying means. Bad means—activities, in other words, that produce attachment and are intrinsically separative—cannot produce unification. The lust for power is essentially separative; therefore it is not by indulging this lust that men can achieve the good results at which they profess to aim. The political techniques by means of which ambition can be restrained have been discussed in the chapter on Inequality; the educational and religious techniques, in the two succeeding chapters. We cannot expect that any of these techniques will be very successful, so long as ambition continues to be popularly regarded, as it is at present, as a virtue that should be implanted in the growing child and carefully fostered by precept and example.
We have now to consider good and evil as manifested upon the intellectual plane. Intelligence, as we have seen, is one of the major virtues. Without intelligence, charity and the minor virtues can achieve very little.
Intelligence may be classified as belonging to two kinds, according to the nature of its objects. There is the intelligence which consists in awareness of, and ability to deal with, things and events in the external world; and there is the intelligence which consists in awareness of, and ability to deal with, the phenomena of the inner world. In other words, there is intelligence in relation to the not-self and there is intelligence in relation to the self. The completely intelligent person is intelligent both in regard to himself and to the outer world. But completely intelligent people are unhappily rare. Many men and women are capable of dealing very effectively with the external world in its practical, common-sense aspects, and are at the same time incapable of understanding or dealing with abstract ideas, logical relations or their own emotional and moral problems. Others again may possess a specialized competence in science, art or philosophy and yet be barbarously ignorant of their own nature and motives and quite incompetent to control their impulses. In popular language, ‘a philosopher’ is a man who behaves with restraint and equanimity—one who loves wisdom so much that he actually lives like a wise man.
In modern professional language a philosopher is one who discusses the problems of epistemology. It is not thought necessary that he should live like a wise man. The biographies of the great metaphysicians often make extremely depressing reading. Spite, envy and vanity are only too frequently manifested by these professed lovers of wisdom. Some are not even immune from the most childish animalism. Nietzsche’s biographers record that, at the time when he was writing about the Superman, he was unable to control his appetite for jam and pastry; whenever, in his mountain retreat, a hamper of good things arrived for him from home, he would eat and eat until he had to go to bed with a bilious attack. Kant had a similar passion for crystallized fruit and, along with it, such an abhorrence for sickness and death that he refused to visit his friends when they were ill or ever to speak of them once they had died. In later life, moreover, he claimed a kind of infallibility, insisting that the boundaries of his system were the limits of philosophy itself and resenting all attempts by other thinkers to go further. The same childish self-esteem is observable in Hegel and many other thinkers of the greatest intellectual power.
Such men are highly intelligent in certain directions, but profoundly stupid in others. This stupidity is, of course, a product of the will. Intelligent fools are people who have refused to apply their intelligence to the subject of themselves. There is also such a being as a wise fool. The wise fool is one who knows about himself and how to manage his passions and impulses, but who is incompetent to understand or deal with those wider, non-personal problems which can be solved only by the logical intellect. The wise fool does less harm than the intelligent fool and is personally capable of enlightenment. The intelligent fool, who has no knowledge of, or control over, himself, cannot achieve enlightenment so long as he remains what he is. However, if he so wishes, he can cease to be an intelligent fool and become an intelligent wise man. An intelligent wise man is capable not only of achieving personal enlightenment, but also of helping whole societies to deal with their major problems of belief and practice.
Under
