by John Fowles
38 An informed man of fifty is the equal at the polling booth of a shopgirl who left school when she was fifteen and knows no more of the real issues on which she is voting than a parrot. They must, to satisfy democracy, be equal at the polling booth; the informed man of fifty would probably be the first to say so. Yet there is a cruelty in this situation, an irony, and an absurdity. An intelligent man is not the same as an ignoramus; yet this is what the polling booth says.
39 A common result of this necessary yet merciless equality; I have no real say in the way the society and country I live in are run; I will do for them what they force me by law to do; but all the rest of my energy and resources will be for my private ends. This sense of total non-participation, of being a pawn in the hands of the chess players, the governors and ministers, is seemingly paralleled in the cosmic situation; and our view of that situation is coloured, darkly, by our view of our virtually non-existent part in the government of our own country.
40 My vote is a futile scrap of paper tossed in a great river; and my life seems a futile atom lost in the endless flux. Resentment becomes pragmatic; egocentric-ity, logical; and the expression of political feeling by illegal and dangerous means – anarchy, rioting; subversion – inevitable.
41 There is only one practical way of lessening this pawn complex and that is by adding to the usual definition of democracy (the right of all adults to vote freely) the rider ‘and as frequently as is conveniently possible’. We can now certainly cope with the technological and social problems of a more frequent general vote on great national issues; and in most Western countries we can, or could, provide the indispensable safeguards of a free press and an unbiassed service of information together with a sufficiently high general standard of education to comprehend and assess it.
42 The one group of people who would certainly reject this idea are the politicians themselves, although they increasingly pay attention to what is a form of unofficial (and dangerously manipulatable) plebiscite: the opinion poll. Their arguments are familiar – the fickleness and emotional nature of public opinion, the impossibility of governing without continuity of policy, the need to keep secret certain factors in decision-making, and so on. These arguments are not without reason. But men in power are never wholly disinterested in retaining power. However much they may disagree with their opponents over policy, they will agree on the rules of the power game; who gets control may fight tooth and nail to keep it.
43 The public is woman before emancipation. If she was fickle and emotional in her decisions it was because she had never been allowed or expected or conditioned to be anything else; and just as this was a dangerous situation for society, so is the present total non-participation in government by the vast majority of adults.
44 A more frequent vote system would not greatly alleviate the individual predicament, which is strictly a numerical one. The single vote must always count for nothing. But it is the first step towards a less isolating situation. Meanwhile, we shall remain the impotent millions.
THE NECESSITY OF THE NEMO
45 And yet the nemo, like hazard, like the indifference of the process to the individual, is essential to man. It is the effect in him of knowing that human existence is unequal. It is both the passive horror of this condition and the active source of the energy needed to remedy it.
46 The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.
4
RELATIVITY OF RECOMPENSE
1 If we allow ourselves to be trapped between the jaws of our imagination and our reality – between that better world we dream of and the worse one we inhabit – we may find our condition a very unsatisfactory one; and one of our traditional compensations is to look down at all those lower’ forms of life to which we suppose ourselves superior in happiness. Our human world may seem cruel and brief; but in the rest of nature at least it is worse. This consolation does not bear close scrutiny, for what is revealed then is not a universe of hazard-bestowed privilege, one in which man stands highest on the ladder of luck, but one in which – with a single exception – there reigns a mysterious balance and equality among all the forms of animate matter. I call this equality in existing relativity of recompense.
2 It can be defined thus: Relativity of recompense is that which allows, at any stage of evolution, any sentient creature to find under normal conditions the same comparative pleasure in existing as all other sentient creatures of its own or any other age. Two factors establish this equality among all sentient forms of life, whether they be past or present, simple or complex, with a life-span of an hour or one of decades. The first is that they are all able to feel pleasure and pain; the second is that not one of them is able to compare its own experience of pleasure and pain with any other creature’s. The single exception to this happy oblivion is man.
3 But if man is an exception it is in relation to his own age, not to past or future ages. That there are ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ stages of evolution is, from the point of view of the pleasure to be derived from being, a mirage. There is no justification for saying that in general the humanity of our own age is happier or less happy than the humanity of any or some other age, past or future. We have no means of assessing the intensity of the pleasure other ages found or will find in existing; and it is certain that whole sources of pleasure and modes of feeling, like whole species, can fall extinct. This vitiates any calculation of special absolute recompense.
4 Our world may seem more secure, another may have seemed more adventurous. Our world may seem more knowledgeable; another, more full of mystery. There is no apparent special advantage of our age that cannot be balanced by some special advantage in every other.
5 All life lies parallel in each moment of time. In the scale of happiness evolution is horizontal, not vertical.
6 All dogs, past, present and future, are equally happy. It is clear to us humans that they are not; but no dog knows this. Man then has been exiled from contemporary relativity of recompense by consciousness. The enormous price of knowledge is the power to imagine and the consequent power to compare. The ‘golden’ age was the age before comparison; and if there had been a Garden of Eden and a Fall, they would have been when man could not compare and when he could: between Genesis 3:6 and Genesis 3:7.
7 Every human object of envy raises two doubts. Is he as happy in his circumstances as I imagine him to be? Would I be as happy in his circumstances as I imagine I would? These doubts should lessen the effects of inequality. But the capitalist notion that the conditions of happiness are the same for all tends to make us answer each doubt in the affirmative.
8 The millionaire buying a luxury yacht; the commuter buying a new car; the workman buying a new fishing rod; the hobo getting a sound pair of shoes. It is axiomatic in a capitalist society that hobo envies workman envies commuter envies millionaire. It is lucky for those who believe in such societies that we know neither the degrees of pleasure nor where we each stand against them. But man still gropes after that remote memory of the animal relativity of recompense. Although we may not, in terms of individual pleasure felt, be quite so far from it as we are led to imagine in a money-worshipping society, we are far enough.
9 Humanity, though exiled from relativity of recompense by the development of consciousness and imagination, has, by this very development, the power to institute a conscious and rational contemporary relativity of the same kind. For us the lack of relativity of recompense, the inequality we know, is the prime reason for progress. We are allowed to see that we are not equally recompensed; and far from it. But we are the only organism that can know, tolerate the knowledge, and find the remedy.
10
Animals lack what we have gained, but we have lost what they still have. We should love them not for their human attributes, but for their innocence. With them we are still in the Garden of Eden; and with ourselves the Fall is every day.
11 The forms of non-human animate life are like a gang of builders in absolute darkness, unable to see either their own or their fellows’ work. But we were given light to see by; and at once we saw that some had easier and pleasanter work than others, and there began the long age of envy. But now slowly we realize, we must realize, that we all deserve access to, even if we do not get, equal happiness. The message of our situation is clear: we must create the same equality in the new light as we were given in the old darkness.
12 We have no guarantee that humanity is not an aberration of evolution, a doomed sideline. At most we can be only an experiment, a possibility in the process. Consciousness has given us the power to destroy ourselves as well as the power to preserve ourselves. Nothing shows more clearly that to be human is not a privilege, but an irrelevance to all except humanity.
HAPPINESS AND ENVY
13 We measure the amount of inequality in our personal and social lives by the concepts of happiness and envy. These two conditions dominate our behaviour, and we can trace their origins back to the most primitive forms of life. Happiness is to possess the means of survival – ‘territory’, ‘cover’, a mate, food, effective means of defence against predators and parasites, and so on; envy is to lack these things. Happiness, in short, is security, but a security denned by the experience of insecurity, which is the passive aspect of envy.
14 Happiness is essentially the desire to prolong life just as it is; envy, to change it. In terms of evolution happiness is thus a chief obstacle to progress; and envy, a chief source of it. Yet happiness is a kind of proof that it was worth surviving until now, just as envy is a kind of intention to survive from now on. Both states are necessary for evolution. One is the propaganda department publicizing past and present achievements of the government, and the other is a permanent committee of criticism.
15 Plato’s definition of the just society was one in which each is happy to be what he or she is; that is, a society without envy. In our unjust ones, all our political and social confrontations are between the party of happiness and the party of envy; and all our present troubles stem from our inability to think of these two parties except as mutually destructive opposites whose only postures can be those of aggression.
16 Happiness is essentially anti-social. It always implies a comparison, a knowing that others could be, but are not, enjoying the particular happiness that we enjoy. This is true of private happiness and public happiness. The theatre audience, the stadium of spectators, even a whole nation are happy because there are others not present and not happy in this way.
17 Happiness is that it happens to me, and the happiness of even the poorest man is unique; he can only be envied it. It is and can be only his. We are all Crusoes; no one knows our happiness, and unhappiness, like ourselves.
18 It is therefore in the nature of happiness to create an unequal world. A source of happiness available to all becomes like a woman available to all; possession becomes increasingly unlikely to bring happiness. Again and again after revolutions we see the paradoxical metamorphosis of the élite of the revolution into a new privileged class, privileged above all in the access they give themselves to pleasures denied the Many; and though there may be in this an element of imitation, such élites are really the victims of the fundamental human need for, and the anti-social nature of, happiness.
19 The envious make a characteristic false syllogism: happiness goes with privilege, privilege is evil, therefore happiness is evil. From this springs the puritan-ism so characteristic of the early stages of many revolutions and the doomed attempts of so many left-wing theoreticians to locate a new sort of happiness in such things as labour, social sacrifice and the good of the state. These attempts are not doomed because happiness cannot be found in such things, but because everyone is expected to find happiness in the same sources. State or doctrinal or any form of generally imposed happiness is a contradiction in terms.
20 Such imposed happiness – all denigration of the right to choose what shall make one happy – is fundamentally totalitarian, a perversion of envy that institutes a vicious circle of envy destroying happiness destroying envy… until humanity grows as conditioned as the animals in a laboratory experiment.
21 The truth is that both parties are right: the party of envy when it maintains that society must provide equal access to the chief sources of happiness – fairer economic conditions and the rest – and the party of happiness when it maintains that society must allow the individual a maximum freedom to decide what those sources shall be. Neither capitalism nor communism are suited to contain both these truths, or to establishing a society giving equal access to every source of happiness.
22 Both political extremes have realized that the condition of envy allows the easier manipulation of the Many. To the right it justifies the use of repression, censorship and tyranny; to the left, that of revolution and sedition. Angry mobs justify military dictators; and vice versa.
23 What is evil is not personal happiness but special personal privilege springing from unjust social privilege. The great evil of capitalism is that under it not only do we not have the same access to the sources of happiness, but a world is created in which the chief source of happiness is having access to it. It is not simply the apples in the orchard that those who are excluded envy; they envy even more the right to enter the orchard. They long to be members of an exclusive club because it is exclusive; not because of the facilities it offers.
24 Yet at their best capitalist societies, though they distort the nature of happiness and chain it to economic conditions, stand for a right concept of happiness; just as communist societies, at their best, stand for a right concept of envy. The great virtue of the capitalist system is that it allows a freedom of pursuit of happiness that corresponds with the basic human need; and the great virtue of the communist system is that it can permit envy to express itself by means that are not wholly destructive. It forces the rich to share what would be destroyed if the rich were totally destroyed; for in even the most frivolous and selfish castes and cultures there is an element that is good: the right to be freely happy.
25 Our problem is to reconstruct the relativity of recompense of our preconscious past; to isolate the virtues of both envy and happiness, to take the destructive aggression from the one and the destructive selfishness from the other, and to get them to interact. Above all, it is to establish this by science and reason and charity, and not by emotion, blood and blackmail.
5
DOING THE GOOD
1 There remains one other, and very vital, problem that breeds dissatisfaction with the human condition. It is freedom of will.
2 We are here in another Bet Situation; that is, we are faced with a problem that we cannot and never shall solve, but about which we ought to come to some conclusion. I must bet either that I have no freedom of will and my actions are never my own, however free and willed they appear to be, or I must bet that I have, or can achieve, some sort of freedom. I can, thirdly, make no bet and remain agnostic.
3 This is in many ways an easier race to bet on than those that oppose an intervening and a non-intervening god, or an afterlife and a total extinction. Most religions and codes of justice have supposed complete freedom of will in order to make their ethical and punitive systems effective; and this is more forgive-able, if no less undemonstrable than the determinist reduction of all human behaviour to mechanics. ‘A mailman was drowned in the floods’ and ‘A mailman was murdered by a gunman’ may belong to the same category of events in evolution; but not in their significance to human society. We may say that this particular murderer had no freedom of choice when he pressed the trigger; but not that all men would have had no choice in a similar situation. We may argue about the degree of free will possessed
by this or that individual; but to deny it to all mankind is to beg the great question of why we are not all gunmen – and why we are capable of disinterested choices.
4 It may turn out finally that indeed we do not, in some evolutionary or biological sense, possess any free will. All our ‘free’ choices may be finally attributable to some conditioning over which we have no control. Even if we could establish the contrary – total free w ill – W e are still limited, since to be completely free we should need an absolutely free field of choice as well as the freedom to choose in it. We are in fact confined to the courses of action available, perceivable and feasible to us. I cannot choose whether to be a woman or not because I was born male; and so on. Yet there remains the fact that we all have experience of situations when we feel (and more importantly, an outside observer can feel) we choose freely. We are perhaps, are almost certainly, machines; but we are machines so complex that they have developed a relative freedom to choose. We are in a prison cell, but it is, or can be made to become, a comparatively spacious one; and inside it we can become relatively free.
5 There may be situations and senses in which Euclidean geometry is not true; but it is enough for ordinary purposes that it seems true, and ‘works’, in ordinary situations.
6 Chess permits freedom of permutations within a framework of set rules and prescribed movements. Because a chess player cannot move absolutely as he likes, either in terms of the rules or in terms of the exigencies of the particular game, has he no freedom of move? The separate game of chess I play with existence has different rules from your and every other game; the only similarity is that each of our separate games always has rules. The gifts, inherited and acquired, that are special to me are the rules of the game; and the situation I am in at any given moment is the situation of the game. My freedom is the choice of action and the power of enactment I have within the rules and situation of the game.