by Josef Steiff
Jeremy Paul’s non-canonical play “The Secret of Sherlock Holmes” clearly displays the link between boredom and evil. In the course of the play Holmes hints that he may in fact have created his nemesis, the infamous Professor Moriarty. Why? Put yourself in Holmes’s shoes. He’s an unequaled intellect. On occasion he meets a puzzle that challenges him, but these occasions are infrequent and fleeting. How to relieve the boredom? What does he need? Drugs aren’t helping anymore—Watson’s a total square. Friends aren’t working—their astonishment is briefly amusing, but not engaging. You need an opponent, an equal and opposite number. If one can’t be found, make one.
Pascal and Kierkegaard have the same recommendation for avoiding this sort of profound boredom and its consequences, but I don’t think it would really work for Holmes. Pascal and Kierkegaard argue that the way to escape from the sort of profound boredom is through a religious life. This touches on something we mentioned earlier: boredom’s often caused by our lack of interest in the world, which can be traced to a lack of a sense of purpose. Religion, at least in theory, provides that purpose. Still, the purpose provided by religion depends on the ability to believe in religion. Holmes, being the modern character he is, has a murky relationship to religion at best. Aside from one rather uncharacteristic monologue about the beauty and uselessness of roses in “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” he never seems to broach the subject, except when his quarry has some vague connection to a foreign and mysterious religion.
The Seven Percent Conclusion
There are several ways to combat the various types of boredom. Few of them are effective for very long. Much as I disagree with Pascal’s and Kierkegaard’s recommendation, it has the virtue of getting to the heart of the problem. The issue is that their solution depends on a complete change of worldview. It is not enough to simply “get” religion to combat boredom—one would have to shift one’s entire way of living in the world to a medieval perspective. Modern religious people face boredom too, sometimes while engaged in the act of worship. Regardless of how appealing you may find the idea of combating boredom with religion—and some do—it’s simply not possible. The modern world can be, among many other things, intrusive.
So how do we deal with boredom without the use of a time machine? Holmes offers a few possibilities: work, amusement, drugs, and evil. Clearly, we’re going to want to avoid the latter two for a variety of reasons—the cure would be worse than the disease. As for work and amusement, they’re quite effective when dealing with being bored by something, provided they are not the source of our boredom. They can help us avoid being bored with . . . as well. But they do nothing for profound boredom.
The problem with all of Holmes’s solutions, indeed all of the common solutions to boredom, is that they confront a symptom rather than the disease. Boredom may be epidemic, but it is not the epidemic. There’s something underlying it, something intrinsic in modern life that makes us bored. So, we have to learn to live with it, because modernity is not going anywhere.
Chapter 26
Willful Self-Destruction?
Greg Littmann
“But consider!” I said earnestly. “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle.”
—Dr. Watson in The Sign of the Four
The greatest mystery in the Sherlock Holmes canon is this: How is it possible for a fellow as clever as Sherlock Holmes to be a habitual user of cocaine?
Holmes’s cocaine use is more mysterious than the fate of Dr. Watson’s bull-pup, the number of times Watson was married, or the issue of exactly which of the good doctor’s limbs received a Jezail bullet at the battle of Maiwand.
Holmes is intelligent enough to know that he shouldn’t inject cocaine and yet, for many years, he does so regularly when bored. Indeed, on at least one occasion he injects himself with a seven percent solution three times a day for several months, leaving his forearm “all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncturemarks” (The Sign of the Four). Had not Watson eventually “weaned him from that drug mania” (“The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter”), he may never have given it up, eventually retiring to the Sussex Downs to disastrously (if hilariously) combine heavy cocaine use and beekeeping.
It might be tempting to excuse Holmes’s behavior on the grounds that the dangers of the drug were not well known at the time. After all, cocaine was legal in England until 1917 and many believed that it was harmless, or even medically beneficial. Some doctors prescribed cocaine for their patients, and cocainebased medicines were openly and enthusiastically advertised—”A useful present for friends at the Front” promised one 1915 ad in The Times, unwittingly doing its bit to make World War I just a little more dangerous for the British soldier.
However, as Watson eloquently argues in The Sign of the Four, the drug may well be harmful for all that is known about it, and it makes no sense for Holmes for take any risks with the thing that matters most to him in life—his extraordinary brain. How could someone so intelligent do something so foolish? Baffling!
The Mysterious Nature of Weakness of Will
I was horrified by my first glimpse of Holmes next morning, for he sat by the fire holding his tiny hypodermic syringe. I associated that instrument with the single weakness of his nature, and I feared the worst when I saw it glittering in his hand.
—“The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter”
When people give in to the temptation to do something that they know isn’t in their best interests, we say that their will fails them. What makes weakness of will of the sort Holmes displays so mysterious is that he is not choosing between two different goals, but between two different degrees of achieving the same goal—happiness. Yet with happiness as his goal, he chooses the path of less happiness over the path of more happiness.
Holmes shoots up because the cocaine is pleasurable—it helps to relieve his boredom when his mind is not absorbed by a case. However, his habit is liable to bring him less pleasure in the long run. If Holmes were ever to learn that he had damaged his faculties of reason, he would surely be plunged into despair for life. So Holmes takes cocaine for the sake of pleasure, but at the same time understands that he will likely receive less pleasure by doing so. How can it be?
To make the problem clearer, consider the absurdity of someone taking pleasure as their goal, and then choosing a course of action that brings them suffering instead. Imagine Watson returning to 221B Baker Street one evening to find Holmes sitting by the fire, repeatedly striking himself in the face with his violin. Shocked, Watson demands to know the meaning of this. Holmes explains, through swollen lips, that he had picked up the instrument because he thought it would be enjoyable to play it, but having reflected upon the fact that it would be most unpleasant to be repeatedly struck in the face with it, he had chosen that course of action instead. “Whatever is your object, Holmes?” cries Watson in amazement. “Pleasure Watson, though this activity gives me none and never shall,” replies the great man and smashes his fifty-five shilling Stradivarius into his thin, hawk-like nose with a strength for which Watson should hardly have given him credit.
Such a scene would make no sense. If Holmes’s object is pleasure, it is absurd for him to knowingly choose suffering instead. However, if it’s absurd for one seeking pleasure to choose suffering instead, it is presumably no less absurd for one seeking pleasure to choose the lesser pleasure over the greater. It’s akin to desiring money but, upon tunneling from your cellar into the bank vault next door, stealing only half of what is there. So how can it be that Holmes continues to take cocaine in the interests of his own happiness, knowing full well that his happiness would be better served by refraining?
A Mystery You Cannot Ignore
“Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dear Watson,�
�� said Holmes that evening, “it can only be as an example of that temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be exposed. Such slips are common to all mortals, and the greatest is he who can recognize and repair them.”
—“The Disappearance of Lady Francis Carfax”
There’s nothing unusual about a human being giving in to pleasure by doing something that they know will not serve their happiness in the long run. You yourself do this. Perhaps you eat too much, or drive too fast, or smoke tobacco (“poison” as Watson reminds us). You might even gamble more than you can afford, like Sir George Burnwell (“The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”) or trifle with the affections of young ladies, like that king of bohemians, the king of Bohemia (“A Scandal in Bohemia”).
Whatever exactly your vices may be, you know very well that you have them (shame on you!). However, as Holmes so often reminds us, the fact that an event is not exotic does not indicate that it lacks deep mystery. Indeed, it is the fact that such baffling behavior is so common that makes it so philosophically important. We’ll be using Holmes as our touchstone because he provides such a clear example (perhaps literature’s clearest example) of the problem at hand. However, this mystery directly concerns us all. How is it that, in the interests of happiness, we do things we know are likely to make us less happy? The answer to this question may provide us with clues about how to stop.
As Sherlock Holmes recognizes, a reliance on one’s own powers of observation and reasoning is most useful to one who considers the conclusions of other people. Holmes makes up his own mind, but this does not dissuade him from attending university, consulting the Times, or lounging for days in his armchair with his blackletter editions. Similarly, while you will have to make up your own mind about how human beings can knowingly act against their own interests, philosophers have been wrestling with this issue for about two and a half thousand years. The lines of battle were drawn early, in Ancient Greece.
Socrates Takes the Case
“No crime, but a very great error has been committed,” said Holmes.
—“The Man with the Twisted Lip”
It was the philosopher Socrates (469–399 B.C.) who got the debate rolling by famously claiming that such weakness of will, akrasia in the Greek, is a myth. He thus took an approach to solving the problem of akrasia similar to that taken by Holmes to solving the problems of the Hound of the Baskervilles and the Sussex Vampire.
Denying the existence of akrasia does not resolve the mystery in itself, any more than Holmes had solved the Baskerville case when he first doubted that the supernatural hound persecuting the Baskerville line was real. For Holmes, it still remained to explain what was going on—who was really behind the strange events at Baskerville Hall, and who really killed Sir Charles. Similarly, it would not be enough for Socrates to simply deny that weakness of the will is real—he must provide an explanation of what is actually going on in cases of apparent akrasia. If Sherlock Holmes is not being “akratic” when sinking the needle into his vein, how the devil can he come to do such a thing?
Searching for clues to explain apparently akratic behavior, Socrates makes an interesting observation: whenever we choose a less pleasant course of action over a more pleasant course, the lesser pleasure is always nearer to us in time than the greater pleasure.
It makes sense to us that Sir George Burnwell might have ruined himself gambling by choosing the immediate thrill of the game over his long-term financial interests, but if he had ruined himself by exchanging a fortune now for some thrilling games many years in the future, his motivation would be a mystery. Similarly, it makes sense to us that Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, King of Bohemia, might choose the immediate pleasure of Irene Addler’s company even when he knows it is in his best interests in the long term to protect the house of Ormstein from scandal, whereas it would have made no sense if he had immediately thrown away his reputation in the interests of dallying with a woman he intended to abandon.
Again, we can understand that even someone as brilliant as Holmes might opt for the rush of cocaine right now rather than taking the best care of his brain, and thus, as Watson puts it, “for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed” (The Sign of the Four). On the other hand, it would be unimaginable for Holmes to subject himself to a chemical that he knew would destroy his great mental powers immediately, though it would give him a series of passing thrills at some time in the distant future. Similarly, in our modern world, smokers would not smoke if the onset of lung cancer was immediate, nor drunk drivers take to the road if they had to crash the car first.
Socrates likens this phenomena to the optical illusion by which an object appears to be larger when it is closer (and like the auditory illusion by which a sound seems louder when it is closer). Apparent cases of akrasia, then, are really cases of misjudgment in which we mistake the relative magnitude of pleasures due to their relative distances from us; nearer pleasures seem larger and more distant pleasures smaller. Thus, it simply isn’t true that people knowingly choose the less pleasant alternative over the more pleasant alternative. Rather, beguiled by illusion, they choose the less pleasant alternative because they think it is the more pleasant alternative.
As Sir George Burnwell sat at cards, the pleasurable prospect of a big win on the next hand seemed more significant to him than the fact that he was slowly ruining himself; as the King of Bohemia gazed into the eyes of Irene Adler, the pleasure of her company seemed greater to him than the pleasure of his high position; and as for Holmes, the relief of his boredom loomed so large as he prepared his seven-percent cocaine solution, that it seemed more important to his happiness than any costs he might later incur. What they, and we, all need is not a strengthening of the will, but a greater mastery of the science of measuring the relative magnitudes of pleasures and pains. When we have mastered this ability, we will have the information needed to understand which pleasures are greater, and will no longer choose lesser pleasures over greater pleasures. What you and I must do, then, is develop this skill so that we can see things clearly. Exactly how we are to do this may remain to be determined, but at least we can know that what we are seeking is a refinement of our powers of reasoning.
Aristotle Examines the Evidence
“There, that’s enough,” said Lestrade. “I am a practical man, Mr. Holmes, and when I have got my evidence I come to my conclusions. If you have anything to say, you will find me writing my report in the sitting-room.”
—“The Adventure of the Norwood Builder”
Mystery solved? Perhaps, but many philosophers think Socrates is accusing the wrong suspect. Playing Lestrade to Socrates’s Gregson, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) protested that the intellectualized Socratic account fails to match up with the way that akrasia manifestly appears to operate (Nicomachean Ethics). On Socrates’s account, we never know that one course of action is best for us but take another course of action instead. Yet you and I and Aristotle are only too familiar with the feeling that we know what is best for us, yet choose to do something else instead. As you raise the lethal cigarette to your lips (or otherwise indulge your vices), it seems to you that you are perfectly aware of the consequences—consequences you would never choose directly.
Perhaps most powerfully, it seems absurd to suppose that Holmes is unaware of the danger he is placing himself in by indulging in heavy cocaine use. Holmes is a fellow who misses nothing, “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”). Yet his cocaine use seems entirely plausible to us, a trait that is not incomprehensible, but compellingly human. We understand that the great Holmes could do something he knows he shouldn’t because we do that too. Not only does akrasia seem horribly real, it feels not like an intellectual exercise, but a struggle of some sort, as if we wrestle with the Moriarty of our bad desires above the Reichenbach Falls of self-sabotage.
Aristotle, like Holmes, is aware that appearances
need not reflect the way that things really are. What looks from the street like a chap in his dressing gown reading the Times might really be a wax dummy, while what clearly appears to be a case of murder may turn out to be misadventure by racehorse. However, like Holmes, Aristotle believed that our theories should not contradict what appear to be the facts without very good reason.
Aristotle held that akrasia is real, and results not from an error in measurement, but from a clash between reason and emotion. When we fail to do what we know is in our best interests, we give in to our passions rather than following our reason. Sir George ruins himself at the card table because he follows his greed and excitement rather than calculating probabilities and cutting his losses, the king of Bohemia exposes himself to blackmail because he follows his attraction to Irene Adler rather than coolly considering his future and rejecting her, while Holmes injects cocaine simply because he’s doing what feels good rather than heeding his extraordinary powers of reason.
Aristotle’s disagreement with the Socratic account is not complete, though, for he thinks that while in one sense the akratic person knows what they’re doing, in another sense they don’t. He compares their condition to the state of one who is asleep, or mad, or drunk. There’s a sense in which one is no less knowledgeable when half awake, or suffering from depression, or drunk. “Black Peter” Carey, the feared ship’s captain who became “a perfect fiend” when drunk (“The Adventure of Black Peter”) does not suddenly become ignorant of the fact that murderous violence is illegal when he’s full of rum. Yet we may say that his reason is clouded in his drunken state. His case is not unusual. I can think of at least four cases that Holmes solved due to the foolish errors of drunken men who should have known better—“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” “The Adventure of Abbey Grange,” “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” and “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger”—while the number of villains who committed criminal acts when intoxicated, though they should have known better, is greater yet, including, at the least, “The Five Orange Pips,” “The Gloria Scott,” “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist,” and The Valley of Fear.