‘GRATUITOUS ACTS’
8 A famous category of actions – ‘gratuitous acts’ or sudden decisions without rational motivation – are supposed to prove absolute freedom of will. But all they prove is contempt for convention. They spring from the heresy that all restriction is analogous to imprisonment; as if everything we know, from the observable cosmos to the meson, is not restricted.
9 If I were to throw a rotten egg at the Archbishop of Canterbury I might prove that I have no respect for convention; but I prove nothing about freedom of will. A world of irrational actions would not constitute an absolutely free world because for human beings anarchy is only freedom when everyone wants anarchy.
10 In a world where the individual is, or feels that he is, being stamped out of existence it is only natural that the gratuitous act should gain a certain glamour. But this is an indictment of the world as it is, not a justification of the gratuitous act, or a proof of free will.
THE PURPOSE OF RELATIVE FREEDOM
11 If we are only relatively free, then it must be so that we shall evolve a greater relative freedom. This freedom is something that has to be gained: both by the individual in his own lifetime, and by the species during its long history.
12 It is obvious what it is gained by: greater intelligence and greater knowledge, both of self and of life. In practical social terms it requires a higher general standard of education and a different kind of education. Above all it requires social equality. Freedom of will is strictly related to freedom of living condition.
INABILITY TO ENACT GOOD
13 Since it is essential that we should fail to do evil, it is necessary that we should sometimes fail to do good. Will is an amoral force, like electricity: it can kill or it can serve. Failure to enact represents an indispensable safety system, like the fuses in an electrical system.
14 Even if we could enact more of what we willed, the world would be no better since the increased power to will and enact would apply to both good and evil actions. Therefore, to say that we wish we could enact what we will is to say that we need more training in determining what is good and what is evil; not in willing and enacting.
15 Animals have strong wills; they try to enact whatever they will. They are incapable of not acting as they will. That is how we trap them. Weak-willedness both oils and safeguards the machine of human society.
16 But our dissatisfaction is that we are unable to enact the good we freely will. I have a shilling in my pocket for this charity box; yet I pass it by. There are six principle causes of such failure.
17 The first stems from the fatalist belief that we have no freedom of choice in willing an action; and therefore we enact, if we enact, what is chosen for us. Our choosing is an illusion; our action, a waste of energy. To do or not to do… who cares?
18 The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.
19 All forks dream of crossroads; in atoms as in men, complexification causes loss of energy. Throughout history the intelligentsia have been despised for their weakness as enactors. But it would be only in a world where high intelligence were synonymous with high morality that one could wish the most intelligent to have the most power.
20 The third cause of failure to enact good stems from our ability to imagine fulfilment. We know from experience that things rarely turn out as pleasantly as we imagined they might have done; and an imagined ideal consequence may take such a hold on our minds that it becomes impossible to risk the disappointments of reality.
21 Before I act it is as if I had acted before. To say you believe in doing something may be, except in front of witnesses likely to hold you to your word, merely to give yourself an excuse not to do it. For goodness is action; not intention to act.
22 Before it is performed every action requiring a conscious effort of will (that is, which is not obligatory or instinctive) is to the imagination like a sleeping princess. It lies at the heart of an enchanted forest of potentialities. The actual performance then threatens to destroy all that might have been created by other actions; and there is a close parallel with the sexual situation. It is more pleasurable to prolong the time before ejaculation. It is nice to be mean today because I shall be generous tomorrow.
23 The fourth cause of failure to enact good stems from the desire to prove to ourselves by not acting that we can choose to act. Not to act is to act. I am what I do not do, as well as what I do. The refusal to act is often equivalent to the gratuitous act. Its fundamental motive is to prove I am free.
24 The fifth cause of failure to enact is that the action contemplated is so small in relation to the final intention that it seems pointless. It is between these tiny stools – moving the Sahara grain by grain, spooning out the Atlantic – that so many good causes vanish into thin air.
25 The sixth cause of failure to enact applies to those actions that are against something. Here the mechanism of countersupporting may prevent action.
COUNTERSUPPORTING
26 If I am attracted strongly towards a moral or aesthetic or politico-social pole, I shall hate and may wish to suppress its counterpole. But I shall also know that the pole under whose positive influence I live is dependent for much of its energy on that counterpole; furthermore, I derive pleasure from being attracted. My opposition to the counterpole will in this case frequently be of a peculiar kind. I call this kind of opposition countersupporting.
27 I may offer violent physical opposition to some idea or social tendency. But violence breeds violence; strength breeds strength; resource breeds resource. Violent persecution often conceals a desire that enough of the persecuted shall survive for the exercise of more violence. Fox hunters preserve foxes. The keenest shots preserve game most keenly.
28 Violence strengthens the opposed; passion tempers it. To argue passionately against something is to give it passion.
29 Games were invented as a kind of perpetuum mobile, an eternal receptacle for human energy. All the great games: animal baiting, hunting, fishing, ball games, chess, cards, dice, all admit of endless permutations.
A great game is an unfailing well; and it is precisely this inexhaustibility that the countersupporter seeks in the enemy. The Anglo-Saxon ethic of sportsmanship and fair play, which developed out of amour courtois notions of chivalry, enshrines very clearly the principle of countersupporting.*
30 Purely emotive opposition is a boomerang – it will always return home, and not simply to roost. Any opposition that can be picked up and used by the enemy in return is not opposition, but counter-support.
31 The most current way of countersupporting is by masked toleration. It is a general innate weakness of high intelligence. I show actionless hostility towards a counterpole; it is generally one of so vast and general a nature that it seems that however active I might be I could have no effect on the situation as a whole.
32 The masked tolerator knows that the thing he opposes is essential to his well-being. He may, indeed usually does, enjoy expressing his opposition verbally, but he rarely makes any constructive opposing action. Very often he will despise the active workers of the cause that publicly fight what he opposes. He will say that such people are pursuing private ends – they like the excitement of action, they are born extroverts – and that he himself sees too deep, too far. He knows the vanity, or futility, or illusoriness, of active opposition. This is the most felt, most shared, most enjoyed despair of our age.