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.
7 There is finally a paradoxical sense in which we gain free will by living in society. At the most obvious level, the final decision of a committee, though it may not be the decision that some individual members would have arrived at ‘of their own free will’, does represent a freedom of general human will in the face of an apparently determining biological system. This is perhaps the deepest psychological attraction society holds for the individual; though the more easily comprehensible individual in each of us tends to think of other people’s opinions and beliefs as in some way hostile and confining, a deeper intelligence in each is aware that what springs out of this conflict is a greater general freedom – and one in which each eventually shares.