Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  Macbeth, the creation of a mortal dramatist, takes advantage of the absence of his enemy Macduff in England to send men to his castle to murder his wife and children. All his ‘pretty chickens and their dam,/At one fell swoop’. When Macduff gets this news he calls out, ‘Did heaven look on,/ And would not take their part?’ It's a question that has, as yet, received no satisfactory reply.

  It's almost dark. There's still a pale, yellowish light over the tops of black trees at the end of the border. The garden is full of children, all girls. They've been swimming in the pool and they're now eating burgers in buns, sausages in more buns, and warming their hands at the barbecue. They come from Blackbird Lees, an Oxford housing estate full of crack cocaine and crashed cars. Although their homes are quite near the countryside, they come on their holidays not knowing the difference between a cow and a lamb, and are surprised that either animal should produce the food on sale in Tesco. The girls are playing with a football which looks, in the shadows, as white as a skull. Wherever they kick it, it is retrieved and laid back at their feet by our dogs.

  I have brought up the subject of George Eliot in my conversations with Paul, the ex-vicar. He is a bald, perpetually smiling, slightly deaf, former champagne salesman who has spent the afternoon taking the girls from Blackbird Lees to Legoland. He has little patience with the idea of unbelievers behaving well and doing their duty more thoroughly because it's their responsibility and not imposed by an omnipotent creator.

  ‘Whoa!’ Paul utters a cry, when in disagreement, like a man pulling at the reins of a runaway horse. ‘That's altogether out of order! If atheists behave well it's because God gets behind them and makes them do it.’

  So God is kind to atheists? You might have thought he would let them go to Hell in their own way, instead of which he causes them to act as an example to many of the faithful. This was, I suggested, out of character, and I remembered that Randolph Churchill, having read through the Old Testament, told Evelyn Waugh that he hadn't realized quite what a shit God was. ‘Well,’ I was saying to Paul, ‘he was always smiting people. Of course you remember how angry he was with King Saul? He'd specifically instructed Saul to destroy the people of Amalek ‘and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’. Saul, contrary to orders, spared the life of Agag the king and kept the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, ‘and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them’. As a result of this God repented of having made Saul king, news which caused the prophet Samuel to weep all night.

  ‘Whoa!’ Paul called out more loudly, again reining in the galloping horse. It was a cry to which the girls from Blackbird Lees paid no attention at all. ‘That's completely out of order. The Old Testament's full of mistakes, and then Jesus came and put it all right.’

  ‘But the people who did all that smiting…’

  ‘God gives us free will to make a complete bog-up of our lives. It was their choice what they did. Their choice entirely.’

  ‘So you believe in free will?’

  ‘Of course. God allows us that.’

  ‘But if he's an all-powerful God, doesn't everything turn out as he's decided?’

  Paul called out ‘Whoa’ again, understandably as this question has caused great difficulty among religious thinkers. Aquinas, who pondered these matters deeply, was sure that as every operation results from some power, the cause for every operation must be God. So if God didn't produce the Nazi murderers, at least he took no steps to stop them. This is unthinkable and yet the idea of a helpless God permitting evil is equally difficult. Is he merely, as F. H. Bradley wrote, ‘not a “Creator” at all, but somehow a limited struggling sort of chap like ourselves, only bigger and better, and loves us and tries to help us, and we ought to stick to him’?

  The pale yellow sky has faded over the trees. There is only light shining from the house and from guttering candles on the tables. The children are hunting in the darkness for shoes, T-shirts or a lost towel. The Reverend Paul smiles at them benevolently. The confusions through which Aquinas tried to find a way, wanting to separate the responsibility of man (the proximate agent) from that of God (the first agent), worry him not at all. The girls who are taking last swigs of Coke, last bites of beef in a bun, have had no choice but to be born, brought up, schooled in the Blackbird Lees estate, where a cow or a sheep might seem like a creature from outer space. I had done nothing to acquire the dark garden except to be born into it. So what about free will? There was a rhyme in my childhood:

  There was a young man who said, ‘Damn!

  It's born in me that I am

  A creature who moves

  In predestinate grooves,

  I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram!’

  Down at the Old Bailey I had, day in and day out, seen sons and daughters of judges, or top barristers, punishing the sons and daughters of burglars, fraudsters and street-fighters for what must have seemed to them a natural, even a preordained, way of life. Were the elements so mixed in the Reverend Paul, the circumstances of his life so strong, that he had no option but to give up the champagne trade and devote his life to helping the poor escape conviction for debt and to taking children from violent council estates to Legoland? Is marriage a real choice? How many attractive and available people do we meet who fancy us? We don't choose our sexual preferences or cheerful or gloomy dispositions, our illnesses or, in most cases, our deaths.

  One thing can be said about free will: those, like the Calvinists, who deny its existence are a depressing and disagreeable lot. Unless we can assume we are capable of making choices and controlling our destiny, laws can't function, politicians can't be held to account, great artists can't be praised or bad painters and indifferent poets justly criticized. Shakespeare was in two minds about the matter. ‘As flies to wanton boys,/are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,’ said Lear. But Hamlet speaks of the first time when his dear soul was ‘mistress of her choice’. It's not vanity but practical necessity that compels us to see ourselves as free spirits, capable of taking charge of our own destiny. Although our freedom in that regard may be far narrower than we often like to think.

  The garden is empty now. The girls have gone and Paul has offered me his arm to help me back into the warmth and light of the house. If the atheist George Eliot was behaving more like a Christian than many Christians, if the gloomiest determinist still holds criminals responsible for their actions, how much do these age-old questions matter? Can there be a natural instinct for good behaviour, like a belief in natural justice, and if so does it matter if it shines from a divine light or has evolved from the human instinct of mutual aid? The point at which beliefs meet may be more significant, more useful to contemplate, than their sources.

  I used to meet the ageing but still mischievous Graham Greene often over lunch at Felix au Port, the restaurant not far from his home in Antibes. He was persuaded of the truth of the Christian story by a passage in St John's Gospel which describes two men, St Peter and ‘that other disciple’, running to the sepulchre after Mary had, in the dawn, seen that the stones at its opening had disappeared. Peter and ‘that other disciple’ ran together but ‘that other disciple’ outran Peter and arrived first. This was a detail, Graham Greene assured me, that couldn't possibly have been invented and had the very stamp of reliable evidence about it. So the story must be true.

  I found this a convincing argument, and my atheism was subject to a moment of doubt, as was, at many times, Graham's belief in the ‘Grand Perhaps’, which is how Bishop Blougram described God in Browning's poem. As we agreed about so many things, Graham Greene quoted other lines from the same poem which seemed to sum up his religion and my atheism.

  All we have gained then by our unbelief

  Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,

  For one of faith diversified by doubt:

  We called the chess-board white, – we call it black.

  It's good to know that both th
e faithful and the faithless can still be playing from the same chessboard.

  5. An Old Woman Cooking Eggs

  To the proud stones of Greece and poet's imaginings other bequests must be added to make up the superhuman, mirror-resembling dream. I have a gallery of pictures in my head so that, if I went blind, I could still enjoy them. I would direct you to the National Gallery of Scotland, one of the least exhausting, most rewarding collections in the world that, in a few comfortably intimate rooms, contains more masterpieces to the square foot than you have the right to expect. Among the saints and great ladies, the naked beauties and the suffering martyrs, taking her rightful and honourable place is an old woman cooking eggs.

  Velázquez went to Madrid in his twenties and very soon became a court painter, truthfully observing pale-lipped kings, overdressed infantas and the sad faces of the palace dwarfs. Before that he served five years’ apprenticeship to a Sevillian painter whose daughter he married and, taking time off from his religious paintings, looked hard and clearly into the kitchen.

  The everyday scene in the Edinburgh gallery is lit in the sort of way the painter learned from Caravaggio, so that the objects in the kitchen achieve an extraordinary significance. The old woman has an aquiline, Sevillian nose, sharp eyes, a firm mouth and grey hair. The white cloth on her head and shoulders falls in soft folds on the coarse material of her dress. She has the suntanned, loose-skinned hands of her age but one of them holds an egg carefully and the other delicately points a small wooden spoon, ready to drip a little oil in which we can see eggs setting, their yolks and whites clear in the pan. An unsmiling peasant boy is carefully dripping in more oil and the old woman watches him anxiously. The miracle of the painting is the exact and loving re-creation of oil, eggs and earthenware, the shine on the brass pots, the shadow of a knife on a china dish, the feeling of flesh and cloth. Forget all concerns about blessings or terrifying events occurring beyond the grave, this picture celebrates the significant moment when the eggs start cooking and another spoonful of oil has to be dribbled in.

  The old woman, or someone very like her, turns up again in another of Velázquez's kitchen scenes, this time in London's National Gallery. Her head is again covered with a white cloth and she is instructing a sulky and unwilling Martha on how to pound garlic and cook some fresh fish and more eggs. In a mirror we can see that Jesus has arrived at the door and is about to engage the no-doubt-eager Mary in a conversation about life, death and the miracle of salvation. Far more interesting to the old woman is seeing that the fish is cooked properly, dinner is on the table in time and the garlic is well pounded.

  Velázquez went on to paint grander scenes. Venus, the Goddess of Love, lies naked, admiring herself in a mirror held up by Cupid, presenting to us her splendid bottom. He painted kings on prancing horses and military triumphs such as the surrender of Breda and royal persons hunting wild boar. He became famous in Italy for his portrait of Pope Innocent X, a merciless military commander. His final act was to decorate the Spanish Pavilion on the Isle of Pheasants for the marriage of the Infanta Maria Theresa.

  Through all these great events, wars and festivals, the lives of kings and Popes, the old woman remained busy in the kitchen, dealing with the important things in life, such as the exact amount of olive oil needed to fry eggs.

  6. The Domino Theory and the Tyranny of Majorities

  Avoid those whose views on every subject can be confidently predicted after you have discovered what they think about one. You know, with some people who utter dire threats about global warming, for instance, that they are going to be hostile to smokers, motor cars, jokes about mothers-in-law, school nativity plays, strip shows and the swallowing of live oysters. Equally tedious are those who complain about high taxes and are bound to be in favour of the death penalty, take a tough line on asylum seekers and are hostile to gay weddings, homeopathic medicines, Muslims and conceptual art.

  ‘Our interests,’ Browning wrote, ‘are on the dangerous edge of things/The honest thief, the tender murderer/The superstitious atheist’. Characters without contradictions are like eggs without salt. They have failed to work out what they really think about all these great or trivial matters and meekly accept the rule that pushing over one domino will lead to the collapse of a whole line of others. Surprising beliefs are the most precious. Enoch Powell, for instance, at least had a mind that went beyond dominoes. Thought of as a racist because he made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, warning of violence as a result of mass immigration, he was, surprisingly, passionately opposed to the death penalty. In his somewhat strangled voice, he said that there was no evidence that hanging had any effect on the murder rate and that it was an ‘avoidable brutality’ in a world in which we have quite enough unavoidable brutalities to contend with. He was also against listening to music. ‘I don't like things,’ he explained, ‘that interfere with one's heartstrings. It doesn't do to awaken longings that can't be fulfilled.’ He also resented Harold Wilson for having given up power voluntarily. He had always admired Diocletian for doing this very thing, but Harold Wilson, for Enoch Powell, had somehow spoiled or cheapened the great Emperor's gesture. Although no admirer of trade unions, he said he would willingly raise his hat to any union leader who had been promoted to the House of Lords, ‘if I happened to recognize him and was wearing a hat at the time.’ This eccentric collection of opinions was too much for party politicians, who like a straightforward game of dominoes, and Enoch Powell, the only politician since the war who could write Greek verse while sitting on the front bench, had a career which ended in deep disappointment.

  We now have a New Labour government that not only has the whole range of politically correct opinions, but is tempted to enforce them by law against those with contrary views. Beliefs about how you live your life, matters of private decision, views best kept for private enjoyment, prejudice or entertainment, can't be imposed by the operation of the criminal law. Attempts to enforce such views can only make a government the subject of ridicule.

  The sort of conduct that should be subject to the law was well defined by John Stuart Mill. Mill was an extraordinary character. His father, the son of a shoemaker, was a Scottish philosopher. Thanks to him, John Stuart learned Greek at the age of three but had to wait until his eighth year before he conquered Latin. By the time he was thirteen, he had more than a working knowledge of logic and political economy. Grown to manhood, he always started his day's work at the offices of the East India Company with tea, bread and butter, and a lightly boiled egg. He wrote incessantly on political economy, on poetry, history and religion. He was a botanist who played the piano and was greatly afflicted by melancholy. He was also deeply in love with his wife, the former Mrs Taylor, whom he regarded as a superior being. When he published his essay On Liberty, he wrote:

  The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or to forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinions of others to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else.

  Another sentence from Mill seems to me of the greatest importance: ‘Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’ So what we do to ourselves, what we smoke, eat or drink or say, is entirely our own affair. We can spend our lives risking our necks mountain climbing or skiing, wolf down chocolates and read trashy novels, pursue great love affairs or sit staring contentedly into space, work ou
t in the gym or forswear all exercise, and it's absolutely nothing to do with the government.

  When governments say that they have a majority on their side when attempting to enforce a particular view of life upon those who don't happen to agree with them, they should remember Mill on the tyranny of majorities. A democracy isn't judged by the number of times a majority gets its own way but by the freedom allowed, and the respect paid, to the rights of minorities. But society too can try to impose some deadening uniformity by the despotism of the opinion of the majority. ‘It presumes to tell men what to think or read, it discourages spontaneity and originality, strong character and unconventional ideas,’ Mill wrote. ‘Society… practises a tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since… it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.’